Evictions are responsible for four in 10 Londoners being made homeless between July and September this year, government figures show.
In March this year, we looked at the previous quarter's figures and found the number of statutorily homeless people had risen 3% between October and December 2013.
We often see a bit of a tendency to conflate rough sleeping and statutorily homelessness in the news, but the latter means the council have accepted a responsibility to find them housing. The number of London households accepted was 4,340, a decrease of 2% from July and September 2013. That figure also accounts for a huge 31% of Britain's homeless households.
We've written before about the increasing numbers of Londoners living in temporary accommodation — costing the taxpayer millions per year. This has risen by 8% to 45,810 from 2013. Shockingly, that number accounts for 75% of the total for England.
And as the women in Focus E15 are only too aware, 29% more people are being accommodated outside the capital. The group protested in Stratford in October over the local authority leaving social housing empty while they're relocated hundreds of miles away. The London Assembly Green Party's Darren Johnson said:
“These figures show that private tenants urgently need more security, rent controls and an end to benefit cuts. A growing number of families are finding themselves trapped in a cycle of insecure tenancies, sofa surfing, living out of B&Bs, or having to move out of London altogether.”
This week, Hackney MP Diane Abbott called for rent controls following the filibustering by Conservative MPs of an attempt to ban revenge evictions.
Photo by Andy Worthington in the Londonist Flickr pool.
