“What we said to people is rather than go into temporary accommodation, go into private rental. The subsidy from government is higher… and we will keep you on the housing register and give you additional points. It works for everyone,” she said.
Fellow panellist Naomi Morris, senior manager at Birmingham City Council, said the supported exempt accommodation sector was “massive” in the city. There are around 26,000 units of supported exempt accommodation in Birmingham, predominantly housing single and vulnerable people.
“We are working with providers to flip that into family accommodation, use it as temporary accommodation. We can be more assured around the support,” she said.
She added that the council was taking whole hotels and converting them into “24/7 staffed homeless centres” to reduce cost and improve the quality of support for residents.
Sophie Boobis, head of policy and research at Homeless Link, said that the number of evictions from social housing into homelessness “has been going up and up” over the past few years, which is “very worrying”.
She encouraged councils and housing associations to commit not to evict their tenants from social housing and do more work to understand why their tenants were falling into arrears. “We need to do everything we possibly can to avoid eviction,” she added.
Rory Lowings, Solohaus project manager at house builder Hill Group, works with councils to find sites for move-on housing for people leaving temporary accommodation.
He said there is “often an assumption that people who get into temporary accommodation are in some way disreputable”.
“When I deal with local authorities… they really struggle to find sites that they believe to be appropriate, when you know for a fact that they have them,” he added.