Rooms by the Night: Auditing the Temporary Accommodation Bill Before the Cold Bites
Photo: David Smith , CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Every winter, the same arithmetic is done behind closed doors: how many families can be held in a hotel room before the budget line breaks, and how far from home can they be sent before anyone notices. Temporary accommodation is the sharpest test of whether a council is discharging a statutory duty or simply paying a landlord to warehouse people until spring.
Part 7 of the Housing Act 1996 places a duty on the authority to secure suitable accommodation for households owed the main homelessness duty. Suitability is not a matter of taste. It is a legal standard, it is testable, and the evidence needed to test it is almost entirely in the council's own filing system. Your job, as a campaigner, is to get it out and put it in public.
Why the nightly rate is the figure that matters
A council's temporary accommodation spend rarely appears as one number in one place. It is split between the housing revenue account, the general fund, homelessness grant, housing benefit subsidy and, frequently, a handful of cost centres with names like "Housing Options — contingencies." The result is that the headline figure presented to cabinet is often smaller than the sum ratepayers actually carry.
The nightly rate is the number to chase because it exposes the real economics. A room let at £85 a night to a family of four costs more than £31,000 a year — more than a modest private rent, more than a social tenancy, and considerably more than the council would spend on preventing the homelessness in the first place. Where subsidy rules leave the authority covering the gap between benefit levels and the invoiced rate, that difference lands on the council taxpayer, not the Exchequer.
What to ask for — and who is holding it
Submit a single Freedom of Information request, framed tightly so it cannot be bounced as "too broad". Ask for the following, in CSV format, covering the last thirty-six months:
- Placement volumes. The number of households in temporary accommodation each month, broken down by accommodation type — bed and breakfast, nightly-paid hotel, private sector leased, council-owned stock — and by whether the household includes dependent children.
- Length of stay. Average and longest stay for households with children in bed and breakfast, and the number of such households accommodated beyond six weeks. Section 210 of the Housing Act 1996 limits bed and breakfast provision for families with children to six weeks; the count of breaches is a public fact, not an operational secret.
- Nightly rates. The rate paid per establishment, by month, and the number of rooms or units occupied. Addresses can be aggregated to postcode district if the council insists — but the money must be visible.
- Out-of-area placements. The number of households placed outside the borough boundary, by destination local authority district, with the contractual basis for each arrangement and evidence of notification under section 208.
- Net cost. Expenditure by budget line, the housing benefit subsidy received, and the residual general fund cost after subsidy.
- Contracts. Value, term, award route and provider type for every temporary accommodation contract above your authority's publication threshold, including framework call-offs to letting agents.
Where the council reaches for commercial confidentiality, press once. The public interest in how a statutory duty is funded outweighs a supplier's preference for discretion, and rates paid from public funds to house homeless families are not trade secrets.
The out-of-borough question
Distance is where accountability thins out. A family placed three boroughs away is harder to support, harder to keep in school, and far harder for a local reporter to find. Statutory guidance expects placements to be suitable, with proper regard to support networks, schooling and health needs — and where children are involved, that expectation hardens considerably.
Ask for the destination districts and plot them on a map. Then ask the receiving councils, under their own FOI regimes, how many households your authority has placed with them and what those councils know about the properties. Two datasets from two authorities will either corroborate each other or expose a gap that no one has been willing to describe in public.
Licences, inspections and the paper trail of condition
Bed and breakfast and hotel accommodation used for homeless households sits at the edge of several regulatory regimes. Ask for:
- HMO licence records for any licensable property used;
- fire risk assessments and the date of the last fire authority inspection;
- environmental health visits, including the number of properties inspected and the number of hazard notices served;
- the council's own suitability inspection records, including who inspected, when, and against which checklist.
If the answer is that no inspections took place, that is a finding. Write it down and date it.
Complaints, reviews and the ombudsman
Requests for a section 202 review of a homelessness decision are a recorded indicator of dissatisfaction. Ask for the number of reviews requested, the grounds, and how many were upheld. Cross-reference with Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman decisions naming your authority — the upheld ones especially — and pull out every case concerning temporary accommodation suitability. Those decisions are published, quotable, and extremely hard for a cabinet member to wave away.
Building the scorecard
Bring the numbers into one page before the January scrutiny cycle and the budget vote that follows. A scorecard that travels well looks like this:
| Measure | What good looks like | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Households in B&B, monthly | Falling, with prevention spend rising | Steady rise masked by "hotel" classification |
| Families in B&B beyond six weeks | Zero | Any number above zero requires explanation |
| Average nightly rate | Benchmarkable against LHA | Rates above local market rents |
| Out-of-borough placements | Low, notified, monitored | Majority of placements, no notification trail |
| Suitability inspections | Every property, annually | No inspections, no records |
| Reviews upheld | Falling | Rising, with recurring grounds |
| Net general fund cost | Declining as prevention beds in | Cost growth outpacing placement growth |
Publish it as a PDF and a spreadsheet. Circulate it to the scrutiny chair, the housing portfolio holder and the local press on the same morning. Numbers released simultaneously cannot be briefed against selectively.
A fortnight's timetable
Day one: send the FOI request and post the reference number publicly. Day three: request the same figures from the receiving authorities. Day seven: pull every ombudsman decision from the last three years. Day ten: file a supplementary request for contract values if the first response is thin. Day fourteen: publish the scorecard, with gaps clearly marked as gaps — a blank column is itself evidence.
Winter will not wait for the budget cycle, and neither should you. The question to put to your council is simple and it deserves an answer on the record: are you housing people, or are you paying landlords to hold them until the weather improves? Ask it in writing, ask it in public, and keep asking until the answer is documented.
