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Islington Council has accepted additional funding of £637,000 for temporary accommodation from the Greater London Authority (GLA), despite charities campaigning against the use of short-term accommodation.
The GLA has supplied this funding annually since 2021. Originally due to end on 31 March 2024, an extension of one year was agreed until March this year.
The council accepted the most recent funding on 7 March, as the GLA again offered to extend it for another year.
Homelessness and poverty charities have campaigned for more long-term social housing, instead of the short-term and lower quality solutions increasingly used by councils.
Ayla Ozmen, a director at anti-poverty charity z2k said: “Too often, households in temporary accommodation find themselves living in unsuitable conditions, unable to make decisions about their future and sometimes far away from their support networks.
“Temporary accommodation should be just that – temporary. But families are being left in limbo for years, often with little to no information about when they will be rehoused.”
The money from the GLA is to be used by the council to continue to fund its Independent Housing Initiative Support (IHIS) Team.
IHIS offers support to 60 people with a history of rough sleeping, now living in ex-right to buy flats, first purchased by the council in 2021 with the first grant they received from the GLA as part of this fund.
This is just a small part of the borough’s total temporary accommodation spending, though. In the year to March 2024, Islington spent over £13m on temporary accommodation, a 28 per cent increase from the year before.
The total number of people in temporary housing in the borough has increased by 57 per cent since 2020. Islington now has 1,200 households living in temporary accommodation, and their average stay is 64 weeks.
In the year to March 2024, the council purchased 410 properties for temporary housing purposes.
Ozmen said councils should prioritise acquiring suitable social housing, as temporary accommodation often has fewer amenities and leads to worse outcomes for those in need.
“Our ambition must be to end the need for TA [temporary accommodation] and the way to do that is significant investment in the supply of social housing,” Ozmen said.
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Clare Walsh is the beat reporter for St Mary's and St James'. She is passionate about keeping locals up to date on important stories. She is a freelance journalist, and has written for publications including Varsity and Cambridge Creatives.