The problem
At 31 March 2026 there were 135,580 households in temporary accommodation including 177,530 children — both records since the series began in 2004. Children in temporary accommodation have set a record for twelve consecutive quarters.
The financial mechanism is specific and fixable. Housing benefit subsidy for temporary accommodation is capped at 90% of January 2011 Local Housing Allowance rates — frozen for fifteen years. Councils have already absorbed £1.5bn more than they have been reimbursed, projected to exceed £3.9bn by 2030. Gross spend hit £2.8bn in 2024-25, up 25% in one year.
The fastest-growing and most expensive category is nightly-paid self-contained accommodation, now 37.9% of all placements and rising. 43,180 households are placed out of area, 32% of the total, and London authorities account for 82% of those.
What does not exist anywhere is a national view of price. Neighbouring councils bid against each other for the same rooms from the same landlords, with no visibility of what anyone else is paying. It is a market with hundreds of buyers, no price discovery, and desperate demand.
And a new statutory duty has just created a data-matching requirement with no system behind it. The National Plan to End Homelessness commits to requiring local authorities to notify schools, GPs and health visitors when a child is placed in temporary accommodation. That means matching 177,530 frequently-moved children, often placed across borough boundaries, to three separate public services in near real time. Nothing currently does this.
The system
Threshold creates the price transparency that this market lacks. It normalises temporary accommodation spend from council payment data, links it to placement and duty statistics, and produces comparable unit costs by accommodation type, geography and duration.
On top of that it models the subsidy gap precisely — for each authority, the difference between what it pays and what it can reclaim at the frozen 2011 rate — turning a national advocacy figure into an auditable per-authority number that can support both budgeting and reform.
It also maps procurement behaviour: which providers operate across which councils, where the same landlord is charging materially different prices to different authorities, and where cross-boundary bidding is inflating cost for everyone. Neighbouring authorities can then coordinate rather than compete.
Finally it identifies the prevention economics — comparing the cost of a placement against the cost of the intervention that would have prevented it, using each authority’s own data.
Data foundation
Every dataset below is open, or its access constraint is stated
| Dataset | Publisher | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| Statutory homelessness statistics (H-CLIC) | MHCLG | Quarterly duties, placements, accommodation type, out-of-area placements, by authority. |
| Local authority revenue outturn (RO4) | MHCLG | Homelessness and temporary accommodation expenditure, gross and net of subsidy. |
| Local authority spend over £500 | 300+ councils | Transaction-level payments to accommodation providers — the raw price signal. |
| Local Housing Allowance rates | VOA / DWP | Current and historic rates, including the frozen January 2011 baseline that governs subsidy. |
| Companies House | Companies House | Provider ownership structures, to see which landlords operate across multiple authorities. |
| Energy Performance Certificates | MHCLG | Property-level condition and efficiency evidence for accommodation standards. |
| ONS private rental prices | ONS | Market benchmark against which placement costs are assessed. |
Capabilities
Benefits
For government
- Gives MHCLG the evidence base for the National Plan to End Homelessness targets, including eliminating unlawful B&B use beyond six weeks.
- Quantifies the subsidy gap authority by authority, informing whether and how to relink the temporary accommodation subsidy to current rates.
- Supports the new ringfence on prevention spend by showing what prevention actually costs against what placement costs.
- Directly serves the Prime Minister’s stated first instruction on ending rough sleeping and the linked temporary accommodation pressures.
For the public
- Fewer families in unsuitable accommodation, and fewer placed far from schools, work and support networks.
- Money not lost to inflated placement prices is money available for prevention and for building.
- Transparency on who profits from homelessness placements, which is currently almost entirely opaque.
Delivery
Phasing
Risks & mitigations
Providers will object to price transparency. The counter is that this is public money already published under transparency rules; Threshold aggregates what is already open.
Council spend data is inconsistently coded. Depends on the normalisation layer built for System 10.
Published benchmarks can become a floor as well as a ceiling. Mitigated by publishing distributions rather than single reference prices.
Sources
All sources checked in August 2026. Figures carry the reference period of their source, which may differ from publication date. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source it is not used.