Introduction
The Government published their National Plan to End Homelessness Strategy in December 2025 which is a cross-departmental approach to work to bring an end to homelessness. The LGA view is that the strategy marks a step change in ambition and action joining up departmental work, however it must go further and be fully resourced to enable councils and their partners to end homelessness for good.
LGA position
Councils are at the sharp end of the housing and homelessness crisis. Every day, local authorities work tirelessly to prevent homelessness and support those who are at risk — but without fundamental reform and a truly joined-up approach across government, homelessness will continue to rise. The causes and impacts of homelessness are complex, interrelated and multidimensional. Addressing homelessness sustainably and effectively requires joint thinking, shared learning and collaboration across a wide range of partners and disciplines, including the voices of frontline staff and people with lived experience.
The context
The impact of the current housing crisis on communities and the public purse is increasingly unsustainable. Government data shows 330,410 households were assessed as being owed a homelessness duty in 2024/25, an increase of 14 per cent in six years. The number of households in temporary accommodation has also reached over 134,000, including over 176,000 children, with 8,010 people estimated to be rough sleeping. The average house price in England is now 7.7 times higher than average annual earnings.
The increasing costs of providing homelessness services, with complex contributory factors such as asylum and resettlement issues, has meant councils’ net spend on homelessness services has increased by £950 million (125 per cent) in real terms from 2019/20 to 2024/25.
As demand for temporary accommodation increases recent funding reform has pushed the cost of the housing crisis further onto local council budgets. From 2026/27, the introduction of a ringfence to protect spend on prevention in the former Homelessness Prevention Grant means councils can no longer use the entirety of this grant for badly needed TA places. While investment in prevention is to be welcomed, this change reduces the grant funding available to councils to provide TA places, meaning that TA cost pressures now increasingly fall on councils’ core budgets.
While local authorities are struggling to balance their statutory responsibilities with cuts to their overall funding, it is difficult to improve the quality of supply. For example, the Government’s ambition to end the use of B&B use for temporary accommodation could support improved outcomes for residents, However, limited supply of high quality temporary accommodation and increasing demand means that councils will need appropriate resources to achieve this. Therefore, it is imperative that the whole housing system be considered to support this framework for ending homelessness.
Government reforms to address some of the key challenges have been welcomed, including changes to the Right to Buy scheme to enable greater retention of social homes and monies related to their sale, commitments to ban 'no fault' evictions, a leading cause of households presenting as homeless, and the introduction of a multi-year social housing rent settlement including rent convergence from 2027/28 to give greater certainty to the sector to deliver new homes. The Government have also launched the £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme and increased overall homelessness funding and budgets. 'The current shortage of affordable housing in supply or development, increases in demand, and the affordability issues that are contributed to by a frozen LHA rate, all further exacerbate the crisis.' Despite these however there is much to be done to support the commitment to work to end homelessness, and councils’ delivery sits at the heart of this.
Other lobbying positions sit alongside and should be considered in this work such as the ask for government to support move on processes for asylum seekers leaving Home Office accommodation to mitigate homelessness and destitution, to engage with councils well in advance of any asylum accommodation changes and to co-design future asylum accommodation and support models with the LGA and the local government sector as an equal partner as supported by sustainable funding.
Councils stand ready to deliver but cannot solve this challenge alone. Homelessness prevention requires a whole-society approach: national and local government, the NHS, schools, employers, landlords, the voluntary sector and communities all have a role to play.
This Position Statement sets out our asks in light of the cross departmental homelessness strategy, which would help councils and partners to support the aim of ending homelessness.
The Government's role
The LGA has long supported whole system reform to work towards ending homelessness, and the LGA’s recommendation for the role government can play to best support this work is by:
- 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: Ensuring that resources are aligned with preventative goals, flexible, stable in the long-term, and sufficient for stakeholders to effectively deliver their role in homelessness prevention.
- 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.
Our recommendations for the strategy
Enable sustainable funding structures
| LGA recommendation | How this would help |
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Commitment from government to support local authorities with the increasing costs of temporary accommodation in the midst of a housing crisis, and to consider the whole system of funding housing and homelessness as interrelated, particularly in the upcoming homelessness Value for Money exercise committed to by HMT. |
This would support joined-up commissioning between councils, the NHS and partners, reducing fragmentation and enabling strategic planning. Service provision must continue at pace and councils must be fully funded to meet its statutory obligations to prevent and relieve homelessness, in line with the Government's national plan to end homelessness. Treasury should consider the wider funding and affordability crisis and looking at options such as LHA+ rates for policy solutions. |
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Uprate the temporary accommodation subsidy rate to 90 per cent of the prevailing LHA rate. |
Currently councils have spent £1.5 billion more than they have been reimbursed because of the freeze. Current LGA projections put the cost of the gap to local authorities as reaching a total of over £3.9 billion by 2030 since 2026. Because of this ever-widening issue councils are caught in a vicious cycle of ever-increasing temporary accommodation costs versus static rates. Amending the subsidy rate to 90 per cent of the prevailing LHA rate would allow councils to be reimbursed a more reflective cost of temporary accommodation and support their wider housing and general budgets. |
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Amend the New Burdens Doctrine so all new legislative and regulatory requirements for local authorities with Housing Revenue Accounts (HRA) are fully assessed and funded. |
The cumulative impact on HRAs of the significant regulatory and legislative reforms for social housing, alongside rent caps and freezes and inflationary cost uplifts has resulted in a significant number of unsustainable HRAs. Many face challenging choices around investment in existing stock to meet new duties or delivering the new homes communities desperately need. Given HRA income is fixed from social housing rents, amending the New Burdens Doctrine would ensure that new requirements for stockholding councils with HRA’s are fully assessed and funded, so that councils can fulfil all their obligations and provide a high-quality service to tenants without having to reduce housebuilding aspirations. |
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Invest in supported housing and housing-related support through establishing a sustainable long term funding settlement for supported housing. This should include reviewing the housing benefit subsidy rules and ensuring any new burdens are fully funded for the requirements. The regulations underpinning the Supported Housing Regulatory Oversight Act should also be accelerated with whole sector engagement. |
Supported housing plays a critical role in both preventing and resolving homelessness. It minimises the need to rely on costly services such as hospitals, care homes, and emergency accommodation while providing a stable environment for tenants. This will give councils and providers confidence to invest in support services. |
Housing and accommodation delivery
| LGA recommendation | How this would help |
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Provide councils with the tools and flexibilities to bring empty properties back into use, specifically through bringing the Empty Dwelling Management Order prescribed criteria in line with that of Wales, so that the three month notice requirement to inform the owners of an authority’s intention to pursue this course of action is removed, and to also reduce the current timeframe of two years empty for a property to qualify for this action. |
Enabling councils to bring empty homes back into use can play a key part of local strategies to meet housing need. Despite the introduction of an empty homes premium, along with efforts of councils, numbers continue to rise not only across England with more than 300,000 properties across England in 2025 long term empty. |
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Implement committed reforms to the Right to Buy, including reviewing eligibility criteria and the ability to set discounts locally - as outlined in our position statement and the Government’s response to their consultation. |
This would support councils to increase their supply and the quality of affordable housing to meet the demand. There are currently over 1.3 million households on a waitlist for social housing, and it is getting increasingly hard for councils to replace social housing as it’s being sold. Reform to other avenues for councils to increase supply is needed alongside the housebuilding programme to ensure there is access to the supply needed. |
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Allow local authorities to have access to the £2.5 billion of low-interest loans for social housing providers announced at the Spending Review 2025. |
This would support local authorities increase delivery of new social and affordable housing by giving access to more favourable financial loans, given their wider financial pressures. |
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Support the LGA’s recommendations on reforms to the planning system to ensure Councils are able to deliver on housebuilding targets as set out in our response to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) Consultation. |
Reforming the planning system to enable councils to hit ambitious housebuilding targets, including social and market housing supply, will ease the pressures on the availability and affordability of housing which currently are major contributors to homelessness. |
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Councils to charge developers full council tax (at Band D) for each unbuilt home from the point the planning permission expires We welcome the Government’s intention to introduce a 'Delayed Homes Penalty' for those schemes 'which falls materially behind pre-agreed build out schedules'. |
This will incentivise developers to build out to agreed timescales, increasing the supply of homes to increase affordability and availability to help people avoid and councils respond to homelessness. |
Securing income and reducing poverty
| LGA recommendation | How this would help |
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Local Housing Allowance rates must at minimum keep pace with the bottom 30 per cent of local rents alongside reviewing the shared accommodation rate and the benefit cap. |
This will prevent shortfalls in rent that force households into homelessness as their income will reflect real rent costs. This should also include a review of the Broad Rental Market Area system which disproportionately effects some areas where market rents are particularly high. At the time of publication, eviction from the private rented sector is one of the leading causes of homelessness and supporting people to afford their accommodation in line with the market will help lower demand. |
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Commit to a wider review of the benefits system to look at the interrelationship between income and homelessness, including the increasing use of the Crisis Resilience Fund for housing costs, and the impacts on the Broad Rental Market Area on the LHA rates. |
Ensuring that the whole welfare system is focussed on the appropriate policy outcomes will help people remain in their homes from an affordability perspective. The current systems including the benefit cap and the removal of the spare room subsidy are having wider impacts on different cohorts who are particularly at risk of homelessness. Where there are funding streams such as the Crisis Resilience Fund, ensuring that these are embedded in a more long-term flexible use to ensure people are able to manage their money through access to vital services such as financial advice is also crucial. |
Driving evidenced based policy
| LGA recommendation | How this would help |
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Establish an innovation and evidence hub to evaluate what works in homelessness prevention, aligned with the LGA’s wider work on Public Sector Reform. |
This will support councils and their partners in scaling successful approaches through strengthening the evidence base |
Strategic alignment with joint accountability
| LGA recommendation | How this would help |
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Ensure that the National Plan to End Homelessness strategy is aligned with other government and NHS strategies, and the cross departmental targets include ending homelessness as an outcome with specific provisions for particularly at-risk cohorts. Strengthening user-led service design here will also support effective reform and outcomes. |
The Homelessness Strategy should inform and support others, such as the long-term housing strategy and NHS 10 year plan actions, where joining up work on prevention and outcomes across services can support the overall ambition to end homelessness and rough sleeping. All government agencies should be accountable for their role in preventing and ending homelessness and working collectively to drive this forward and joint governance can support the accountability mechanisms across departments and local government. |
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Under the new duty to collaborate, ensure it covers identification, action, and collaboration to prevent homelessness across departments and local services. This should be extended to housing providers, hospitals, and prisons to prevent discharging into homelessness |
This will ensure public services are accountable for their role in preventing homelessness, and councils need public services to take shared responsibility across the whole system. |
Our next steps
To supplement this Position Statement, the LGA will continue to work with Local Authorities to ensure the major challenges are being engaged on and that we facilitate joint working on these.
We will also continually add case studies from local authorities around the country showcasing how these asks could Improve the overall housing picture and to support local authorities to adopt innovative best practice such as on allocations advice.
We will deliver on our commitment within the national strategy to support local authorities on delivering Local Partnership Forums
We will continue to provide analysis of costs and pressures to illustrate the key issues to government.