English councils pay private landlords millions in incentives to house homeless families

Exclusive: Data gathered by Generation Rent shows 37 councils spent 31m in 2024-25 in one-off payments to individual landlords

Councils across England are increasingly spending millions of pounds a year in incentive payments to private landlords to persuade them to house homeless families, with campaigners describing it as a senseless waste of public money".

Data gathered by the campaign group Generation Rent via freedom of information requests showed that 37 councils spent more than 31m on one-off cash payments to private landlords on 10,792 occasions in 2024-25.