A Labour-run London council left more than 100 families homeless without support last year after they refused to be relocated outside the borough, the Observer can reveal.
Freedom of information data from about 80% of English councils shows that they ended their legal duties to 615 households who refused offers of housing outside the local authority area in 2024 – but this national total is heavily skewed.
Labour-run Enfield was responsible for 115 cases, the highest anywhere and accounting for nearly a fifth of all cases in England. It comes as the council tries to buy up housing around Liverpool to relocate homeless families there.
Councils have legal obligations to support and rehouse homeless people, but they can terminate these duties if a household refuses a “reasonable” offer of housing.
That offer must be affordable, but councils have more leeway around location, and the housing affordability crisis in London and other high-demand areas has seen large numbers of homeless people relocated around the country.
Enfield has recently taken a particularly aggressive approach. A report published last year by Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) found that 94% of Enfield council’s offers of private rented housing to homeless people in 2023 were outside the capital, with 59% in the north-east. Perhaps as a result, three-quarters of their offers were rejected, the highest refusal rate of any London council.
“It’s outrageous,” Enfield-based housing and union activist Paul Kershaw told the Observer
. “These are people who are going to have families – they can be vulnerable, and as far as the council is concerned, they’re just being ripped away from their social connections and sent to totally inappropriate locations.”
“You have families here with kids and everything, and what happens is that all your community networks break down,” added Charith Gunawardena, a former Enfield councillor who defected from Labour to the Greens, partly because of dissatisfaction with the council’s housing policies.
“If you just move people to the north, where they have no community links or never lived in these areas, they have a house but everything else is broken down.”
The rising costs of temporary accommodation for homeless people have squeezed Enfield’s finances, triggering a reaction from council bosses.
At a council meeting in September 2023, Enfield council’s housing improvement director, Duane Dyer, said it would take a stricter approach to homeless households, allowing them fewer choices of alternative housing. “We are going to enforce our policy hardline,” he told the meeting. “I think the weakness is that we have not been as hardline as we should have been.”
“I was horrified that they could possibly imagine they weren’t being hard enough on people who are desperate,” said Matt Burn of campaign group Better Homes Enfield. “We have a very significant problem in terms of our homelessness numbers. It comes largely from the housing benefit cap – [people] simply can’t afford private rents, and housing benefit doesn’t cover it.
“Sooner or later, they’re issued with an eviction notice, and they then present themselves to the council as on the verge of homelessness.”
London councils buy £140m of property to move homeless people out of city
Part of the problem is that, for a long time, more expensive inner London boroughs with their own housing crises have relocated their homeless households to Enfield, leading to a rise in rents and using up housing stock that Enfield might otherwise have used for its own homeless people.
But Enfield has also failed to build enough social housing. Its troubled Meridian Water regeneration scheme initially had no socially rented homes planned for the first two phases, though the council told the Observer this position has changed and social housing is now part of the programme.
An Enfield council spokesperson said: “To ensure that residents have access to secure, long-term and stable homes, we have taken the difficult but necessary decision adopted by other London local authorities to look into the possibility of buying a small number of residential properties in more affordable areas.
“Where possible, we continue to seek housing solutions closer to Enfield. We’re focused on building homes. We will continue to work with the government to address our housing needs.”
