Responding to the Prime Minister’s announcement that he intends to end rough sleeping, Cllr Liam Robinson, Chair of the LGA’s Inclusive Growth Committee, said: “The scale of the challenge in ending homelessness for good is immense and growing, with the highest number of people sleeping rough since records began. This is therefore an ambitious and much needed announcement, and we look forward to seeing the finer detail.
“Councils’ net spend on homelessness services has risen by £950 million (125 per cent) in real terms from 2019/20 to 2024/25, and there has been an increase of 51.9 per cent of people requiring temporary accommodation in the same period.
“Councils are integral to the efforts to prevent homelessness in the first place, and support those who are homeless out of it but need to be sufficiently resourced and empowered to lead locally and deliver for their communities.
Notes to editors
There are 134,760 households in TA - This is an increase of 1.8 per cent from the June 2025 figures, and puts the increase from 2024 to 2025 at a 6.9 per cent increase in a year from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. In ten years this has increased by 96.5per cent (from 68,570 in 2015 sept)
The LGA has released its new Homelessness Position Paper (HPP) to outline a comprehensive plan that councils need from a new government to effectively tackle homelessness.
The key asks from the paper are:
- Creating accountability: ensuring that stakeholders are incentivised to prevent homelessness and held to account for delivering their role in prevention and that the cross departmental targets are across delivery considerations.
- Ensuring deliverability: Resources are aligned with preventative goals, are flexible and stable in the long-term, and sufficient for stakeholders to effectively deliver their role in homelessness prevention. This includes:
- A commitment from government to support local authorities with the increasing costs of temporary accommodation
- Uprating the temporary accommodation subsidy rate to 90 per cent of the prevailing LHA rate.
- Ensuring LHA rates at minimum keep pace with the bottom 30% of local rents alongside reviewing the shared accommodation rate and the benefit cap
- Fostering collaboration: Creating the conditions for effective local-level partnerships and ensuring that implementation is guided through collaboration between local and central government, as well as third sector partners.
- Driving evidence-based policy: driving and sharing the results of experimentation and rigorous evaluation and supporting efforts to scale proven interventions.
Read the Position Paper: Homelessness and rough sleeping strategy position statement 2026 | Local Government Association