The figures identified that 4,840 households with newly granted refugees were homeless between January and March this year, 348.1% more than over the same period last year, reports Inside Housing.

An additional 1,270 refugee households were at risk of homelessness, after qualifying to receive homelessness prevention duty in the first quarter of 2024. This is over 100% more than the 600 refugee households facing homelessness in 2023. Homelessness like this occurs when asylum seekers successfully gain refugee status; the Home Office forces new refugees to leave asylum accommodation within 28 days. Rather than granting people sanctuary, achieving refugee status has increasingly resulted in people being “very likely to face destitution, homelessness and fall into crisis”, Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, noted in a report published late last year.

In the new statutory data published yesterday, it was revealed that households with former asylum seekers owed a homelessness duty has increased by nearly 150% over the past year. Former asylum seekers were identified in 3,530 households which were owed a homelessness duty in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 148.6% on the 1,420 households identified in last year’s figures for the same period. In London alone, there was a more than threefold increase, from 170 households in 2023 to 600 households in 2024.

When asked why refugee homelessness had continued to rise, Rick Henderson, the chief executive of charity Homeless Link, told Inside Housing: “Years of hostile government policies towards people seeking asylum in the UK created a backlog of cases at massive cost to the Home Office. In an effort to address the mounting backlog, the previous government – without consulting local authorities or the homelessness and migrant sectors – suddenly changed the procedure for ending asylum support once a decision had been made.”

Currently, asylum seekers who gain refugee status are given just four weeks to leave Home Office accommodation and find their own housing, alongside setting up employment, a bank account and other vital infrastructure. Mr Henderson noted that new refugees were often given as little as seven days’ notice before being evicted from asylum accommodation. “The new government must learn from these mistakes and increase the move-on period from asylum accommodation from 28 to 56 days, in line with the Homelessness Reduction Act. “This will give local authorities and charities the crucial time needed to work with people leaving the asylum system to find suitable accommodation and give them the stability to build the new life they’re entitled to.”

Kristian Draper, the director of services at homelessness charity Thames Reach, said, “The introduction of the Streamlined Asylum Processing system saw a significant rise in the number of people rough sleeping. Extending the notice period will only help resolve this if the Home Office – in line with the government’s commitment to ending rough sleeping – is committed to ensuring that this time is spent delivering support to secure accommodation that meets people’s needs.”

A government spokesperson said in response: “We have inherited huge pressures in the asylum system, but we are working to make sure individuals have the support they need following an asylum decision and to help local authorities better plan their assistance with homelessness. Support for newly recognised refugees is available through Migrant Help and their partners, which includes advice on how to access Universal Credit, the labour market and where to get assistance with housing.” A report published earlier this year found that immigration policies in the UK were making migrants, asylum seekers and refugees ‘destitute by design’.

Daily 5% visitor beds surcharge that will cover hotels, bed and breakfasts and AirBnB could raise up to £50m a year, reports the Guardian.

Councillors in Edinburgh are hoping to build new council houses and improve public parks thanks to a new tourist tax that could raise up to £50m a year. The city council is expected to become the first in the UK to introduce a comprehensive visitor levy using new government powers, with tourists and visitors paying a daily 5% surcharge on their beds from July 2026. The charge, which will be capped at seven consecutive nights, will cover hotels, bed and breakfasts, self-catering flats and rooms let via websites such as AirBnB, and student halls let out to tourists.

The council estimated that if the levy had been in place for Taylor Swift’s three Eras concerts at Murrayfield in June, the city would have raised about £620,000 to invest. The levy, which mimics tourist taxes used by European cities such as Madrid, Amsterdam, Berlin and Lisbon, is expected to raise between £43m and £50m a year from about 5.3m overnight stays a year. Only campsites, the disabled, the homeless, refugees and Gypsy-Traveller sites will be exempt.

Cammy Day, the council leader, said the city aims to use £5m of that income to borrow £70m to build new council housing and other affordable homes to tackle the city’s housing crisis. Edinburgh, like many other popular tourist destinations, has seen house prices and rents soar, pricing out many residents and helping push 3,126 households into homelessness last year. That has spurred protests by anti-poverty campaigners and recent Scottish government measures to impose extra licensing and planning controls on short-term lets.

Day said about 50% of the new tax revenues would be spent on the housing programme and on improving public spaces. That could include parks outside the city centre, replacing the shabby concert venue in Princes Street gardens known as the Ross bandstand, or on upgrading Princes Street itself. A further 35% will be invested in the city’s festivals and cultural venues, while 15% will go on tourism spending. That would all make the city a “much more enjoyable, presentable city for people to come to and live in”.

Day dismissed recent complaints from Rocco Forte, the hotels magnate who owns the Balmoral hotel on Princes Street, who called for a boycott of the tax in a recent article for the Scotsman, claiming a levy of 7% would cost Balmoral guests £1.3m a year. The council leader said they were still consulting people on the levy but there was no evidence from other cities that had introduced a tourism levy that it had cut visitor numbers. Some hoped their levies would reduce visitors, with no discernible effect.

The number of people rough sleeping in the city in recent months has reached unprecedented levels, reports the Liverpool Echo.

Homelessness should be “rare, brief and non-recurring” across Liverpool but a new plan to tackle the city’s housing crisis has laid bare the scale of the challenge ahead. As part of its statutory duties, Liverpool Council has to set out how it seeks to ensure people have access to housing in times of crisis. When it meets next week, the city’s cabinet will sign off on a homelessness strategy for the coming years. However, the plan to end rough sleeping has come slapped with dire warnings that financial pressures and changes to national policy continue to place strain on its services.

A new report into the city’s public health earlier this year indicated the link between poor quality or unsuitable housing on physical and mental wellbeing. Between October and December last year, the demand for homelessness assessments increased by 19% in comparison to the same quarter 12 months previous. Similarly, there has been a 12.1% increase in households in temporary accommodation across the same timeframe. The report said the main reasons for homelessness nationally reflect Liverpool’s trends including friends and family no longer being willing to accommodate accounting for more than a third of cases.

The number of people left homeless as a result of domestic abuse has risen to 17% while the loss of assured short-hold tenancy stands at 15%. The number of households presenting as, threatened with, or who are homeless, has remained consistent across Liverpool but the number of placements into temporary accommodation, and in particular hotels and/or bed and breakfast accommodation, continues to rise at “an alarming rate.” The document added how rough sleeping has also increased in recent months to unprecedented levels. Earlier this summer, the city wide rough sleeper outreach service delivered by the Whitechapel Centre recorded 164 people sleeping rough, with 74 of them helped into new accommodation and/or supported return into existing solutions.

Between 2017/18 and 2023/24, rough sleeping across Liverpool has increased by 141%. The report said one of the reasons behind this was a lack of 24-hour operations by the council’s outreach team until 2022, adding: “This change enabled us to find and support people who previously may have been missed. We have also made better use of intelligence to identify rough sleeping hotspots and directed the outreach team to these, to ensure we are finding as many people as possible and offering them a route off the streets.” The number of people sleeping rough long term was described as “very high” with an increase of 44% recorded.

The plan has warned however the “challenging financial position” of the council will impact how the strategy and subsequent services are delivered. This includes the continuing pressure of providing temporary accommodation which it said “places a significant financial burden” on the city, adding: “without action is likely to continue with increasing demand and a lack of suitable move-on accommodation.” The homelessness budget remains a significant area of financial risk, with an overspend in the last financial year of more than £1.3m. This is despite an increase of £12.5m to reflect the demands on the service. The authority hopes a move towards early intervention and preventative action will lead to a reduction in costs but an expected overspend for nightly paid accommodation in bed and breakfasts is more than £5m.

It is thought the forecasted spend for the last full financial year will have surpassed more than £21.5m, with a peak of 816 bed and breakfast bookings being reached in February. This number is expected to rise further still. In 2022/23, more than 1,600 people in Liverpool approached the council for help with homelessness, with 99% being assisted. Despite this, the authority’s prevention rate was a mere 17%, compared to 45% nationally. Cllr Sam East, cabinet member for housing, writing in the document, said: “Too often, responding to homelessness is seen as a reactive, emergency process. That has to change. We know that people experience housing stress in a variety of ways, beyond the most extreme form – rough sleeping on our streets.

“Severe strains” in the criminal justice system are among the issues that the strategy said would make preventing homelessness harder. City officials said more than a dozen ex-offenders reported sleeping rough. Additionally, the speeding up of asylum applications, leading to evictions from Home Office accommodation after just 28 days is adding to the pressure.

Latest housing data show 151,630 children in temporary accommodation – the most since records began, reports the Guardian.

More than 150,000 children in England are living in temporary accommodation, prompting calls for the government to address what it calls a “national scandal”. Living in temporary accommodation is considered a form of homelessness and can involve people staying in hostel or bed and breakfast (B&B) accommodation. At the end of March there were 151,630 children living in temporary accommodation, an increase of 15% compared with the same time last year and the highest figure since this measure began in 2004. There were 117,450 households living in such conditions in England at the end of March, 74,530 of which included children, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

According to law, B&Bs are meant to be used only for families in an emergency, and for no longer than six weeks, but the figures showed 3,250 households with young people in England had been in such accommodation for longer. The figure for total households in temporary accommodation has increased each quarter for the past two years, and is up by 24% on the figure of 95,000 in early 2022. Shelter, the housing charity, said the government must “tackle the housing emergency head-on”. Polly Neate, its chief executive, said: “Without a clear plan to invest in genuinely affordable social homes, thousands more children will be forced to grow up in damaging temporary accommodation, spending months if not years living out of suitcases, crammed into grim bedsits and B&Bs, and unable to put down any roots.”

Lord Bird, the founder of the Big Issue magazine and a crossbench peer who has spoken out about his experience of growing up in poverty, said the latest figures were “appalling”. “Another winter looms and there’s little being done to turn this terrible tide,” he said. The number of households in England living in B&Bs reached 17,750, and as of the end of March this meant the number of homeless people living in such accommodation was 30% higher than the same time last year, while the 5,550 households with children living in B&Bs was up by almost half, at 44.2%.

The new Labour government said the situation was “a scandal”. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary said: “We are facing the most acute housing crisis in living memory and homelessness remains at record levels. This is nothing short of a national scandal. Urgent action must be taken to fix this. That’s why we are working across government and with local leaders to develop a long-term strategy to end homelessness for good. Work is already under way to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. This includes delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable home-building in a generation, abolishing section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions and a multimillion-pound package to provide homes for families most at risk of homelessness.”

Meanwhile, separate figures from the Ministry of Justice showed bailiff repossessions as a result of a no-fault eviction had reached the highest level for six years. Landlords can apply for an accelerated possession order if their tenants have not left by the date specified in a section 21 notice. There were 2,916 such repossessions between April and June this year, an increase of 31% on the same period last year and the highest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2018. Housing ministry figures showed that 6,630 households in England were assessed by councils as being threatened with homelessness between January and March 2024 as a result of section 21 notices to end their tenancies – up 1.2% from the same quarter last year.

Tom Darling, director of the Renters’ Reform Coalition, said: “While in opposition, this government pledged to end no-fault evictions immediately, and the king’s speech last month rightly promised a ‘renters’ rights bill’. However, renters cannot afford to wait much longer – we must see legislation brought forward soon to get a grip on the situation and address the renting crisis.”

In just a year, more than 9,200 ex-prisoners left jail only to become homeless, reports the Independent.

The number of people released from prison into homelessness has risen 30 per cent in a year despite a major new scheme to house departing offenders, The Independent can reveal. New government figures laying bare the dire state of prisons in England and Wales outline record levels of self-harm, soaring violence and worsening overcrowding in what campaigners have dubbed a “crisis of human misery behind bars”. With the previous government freeing more than 10,000 prisoners up to 70 days early since October in an urgent bid to free up space, analysis of the latest Ministry of Justice figures by this publication found the number of inmates left homeless has soared – risking a “revolving door” back into prison.

The new data shows 9,210 inmates were released into homelessness or rough sleeping in the year to March, rising from 7,055 the previous year – accounting for 13.1 per cent of all 70,000 prison releases, up from 11.3 per cent the previous year. This included 755 women, a rise of 38 per cent on the previous year. The number of people released into other unsettled or transient accommodation – such as temporarily living with friends or family – also rose from 7,725 to 9,565 over the same period. Experts said the rise was partly due to the “chaotic” early release scheme and warned homelessness raises the risk of reoffending by around 50% – confounding efforts to free up prison cells.

Inspectors recently highlighted the case of a high-risk prisoner with a recent history of suicidal thoughts and self-harm, who was released from segregation into homelessness under the early release scheme despite staff appealing against it. He was recalled to prison just days later. For some, prison is better than rough sleeping. Two former inmates described reoffending in order to return to jail “because at least I had support and a bed”. They feared ending up in an even worse situation on the streets. The prisons ombudsman recently investigated the deaths of more than 100 people in the fortnight after they left jail between 2021 and 2023 – and found that a third had been released straight onto the streets.

The Independent understands that, due to difficulties finding beds in the private rental sector, the rollout was slower than hoped – with the scheme having only reached 70 per cent capacity in December and 85 per cent this month. The scheme, which doesn’t cover prisoners on remand, housed 12,205 people between July 2021 and March. Frontline experts warn the situation often merely “kicks the can further down the road” for those who do receive help, only to be forced to live on the streets after their 12 weeks of accommodation has finished. The percentage of people left homeless three months after leaving prison rose from 6.7 to 9 per cent year-on-year – an additional 1,000 people in the 12 months to March.

Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, said the new scheme is “absolutely the right priority” but that the “concerning rise” in homelessness highlights the urgency of this task, and that “more support is needed for its success”. With jails currently at 99% capacity, the new government has announced a new scheme to free some 5,500 people 40 per cent of the way into their sentences from September – a process which experts hope will allow more time for pre-release planning than the current emergency scheme. But Ms Sinha warned that reoffending will only be reduced once ex-inmates are “set up for success” with housing and sufficient support. The new data shows 7,415 people were recalled to jail between January and March, some for breaching licence conditions related to having no stable address.

One former inmate who has been to prison six times said he was forced to sleep rough or in a tent several times after being released. He said: “It was horrible, it was summer but it was still cold, it was freezing. I felt like I had no purpose. I was getting up just to walk round all day, and the days felt like forever. I didn’t know what to do. Some people actually feel prison is a better alternative and do go back to committing crime, and to be honest I did too.”

Another man described sleeping “in all sorts of places, the local park, abandoned buildings, wherever I could find”, saying it was “always the same – a few nights out, maybe clean, then it gets overwhelming, and I would find a way of getting myself back in prison”. He said that being housed by the charity Nacro upon his recent release “has made all the difference in the world”.

Sian Williams, chief executive of the charity Switchback, said: “Having a stable address is often the bedrock of mental health, sustainable employment, and obtaining practical support – all of which are crucial to people trying to live differently.”  The charity said seven in 10 young men it currently supports had left prison homeless, and is calling for a national framework which provides first-night accommodation and a minimum standard of support to access housing for every person leaving prison.

Andrew Neilson, of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the new data shows how dysfunctional the criminal justice system has become, “and how that dysfunction spreads into the community”. He added: “The new administration has announced a more consistent programme of early release, that will allow services to better support individuals as they are moving into the community. But ultimately we need investment in housing, rather than building new prisons, if we are to find a lasting solution to this problem.”