One of the headline national targets in the government’s new homelessness strategy A National Plan to End Homelessness is to ‘eliminate the use of Bed and Breakfast accommodation for families, other than very short-term use in emergencies’ by the end of this parliament.
Can it be done? The evidence from the past says it shouldn’t be impossible. In a remarkable achievement that passed most of the public by, the last Labour government got B&B down to 400 families for the whole of England in December 2009 from a total of nearly 7,000 in 2002.
And the evidence from this government so far is pretty good. After going back up to 5,910 families in hotels in June 2024, the number dropped to 3,340 by June 2025, a fall of 43% in just one year!
And of course it’s really needed. The use of B&B to accommodate homeless families other than in an emergency has been against the law since 2004.
Families in B&B usually means a whole family living in one room, sometimes with ‘triple bunks’, where a child sleeps above their parent’s double bed, and sharing washing facilities, cooking facilities or both with other households they don’t know. Accommodation is sometimes of a poor standard and often far away from schools, jobs and everyone the family know and love. Despite the name, breakfast is usually not provided...
At the current rate of progress, we could have minimal use of B&B for families by December 2026, but it can only happen if all the local authorities now using B&B are able to do what the most successful councils have done to date.
52% of the 2,570 recorded reduction in families in B&B in England over the year to June 2025 came from just 10 councils: Leicester, Waltham Forest, Enfield, Greenwich, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets, Bristol, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP), Liverpool, and Nottingham.
Progress has been supported by dedicated Emergency Accommodation Reduction funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in many of these councils, and this approach seems to have had real success.
What is striking though, is that the 43% fall in B&B for families in England actually coincided with a continued rise in total temporary accommodation use for families of 7% during the same 12 month period. And indeed, 7 of the 10 councils who saw the biggest fall in family B&B saw a rise in total family TA.
In some cases, such as Enfield, Tower Hamlets and Bristol, the use of B&B for families went down by over 95% whilst overall, TA for families went up.
This tells us that although the government quite rightly wants to support much more homelessness prevention, this is not the key to reducing B&B for families in the short to medium term. The key to reducing B&B quickly for most local authorities is to find alternative accommodation to use as TA that is not B&B.
Other measures can certainly help, like more regular TA inspections and removing barriers to move on such as rent arrears or not having completed housing allocations documentation. But in the majority of cases where B&B has gone down in the last year, such measures have not reduced total TA for families and so cannot be the main driver in B&B reduction.
The exception to this rule in the top ten authorities is Redbridge, whose overall reduction in family TA was significantly larger than the reduction in family B&B. And it’s also true that Manchester City Council managed to reduce B&B dramatically in the previous parliament though a radical change to its approach to homelessness prevention and homelessness assessment.
But every other council in the top ten between June 2024 and June 2025, succeeded in reducing their family B&B wholly or largely through an increase in their use of other forms of TA.
In most cases this was through an increase in self-contained nightly paid TA or, in the case of Greenwich, Bristol and Nottingham, through a marked increase in using local authority or housing association stock as TA.
Both self-contained nightly paid TA and TA from social housing stock have the advantage that they can be flexibly reduced relatively easily if demand decreases through better homelessness prevention and relief or faster move on from TA in the future. They can also both have significant downsides, especially nightly paid TA which is often expensive and not always of good quality, but also social housing stock if it reduces the lettings available to other families in housing need.
But if we really want to eliminate the use of B&B for families in TA in this parliament, it’s clear that local authorities who use B&B for families have to plan to urgently increase whatever other accommodation supply they can get. This is because realistically, in the short term, that is mostly what works.
