Government to start publishing age breakdown of children in temporary accommodation after Inside Housing investigation

Inside Housing submits quarterly Freedom of Information requests to every local authority to attempt to fill this data gap.

The latest update estimated that as of March 2024 in England, Scotland and Wales, there were nearly 34,900 households in temporary accommodation with children aged under five, and nearly 3,000 in B&B accommodation.

Earlier this year, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now MHCLG) published ad hoc data on the ages of children in temporary accommodation, but it only provided a snapshot of the totals across England, without geographical breakdowns or details on B&B accommodation.

Inside Housing understands that the government is intending to require local authorities to provide age breakdowns of its temporary accommodation data on a regular basis, which may be annually or quarterly.

A spokesperson for MHCLG said: “Homelessness levels have sky-rocketed and too many families are living in temporary accommodation in our towns and cities. We will take the action needed to tackle this issue and develop a long-term, cross-government strategy working with mayors and councils to put Britain back on track to ending homelessness.”

Sylvia Stoianova, deputy programme director of the National Child Mortality Database, said: “Collecting and publicising data about the numbers of young children in temporary accommodation, as Inside Housing’s data dashboard is doing, is essential to building a clearer picture of this issue and raising awareness of how it affects children.

“This would allow for more integrated and multi-agency support for families, helping integrated care boards for example to see the scale of the problem in their area so they can plan services.”

“Our data shows that temporary accommodation has been a contributory factor in the deaths of 55 children between 2019 and 2023, and we know that housing issues make some groups, such as children with chronic conditions and disabilities, more vulnerable. Gathering more and better data on this issue will be key to improving and saving children’s lives.”

The change in policy on publishing the data comes as London boroughs revealed they are at risk of exceeding their homelessness budgets by £250m in 2024-25 despite an increase in government funding, as temporary accommodation costs soar to around £3m a day.