Adobe Stock File Photo
The number of rough sleepers in London is 56% higher since 2021 when the pandemic saw levels drop.

1,132 people are sleeping rough every night in London, showing a return to pre-Covid levels since 2021, when the pandemic saw the number fall by nearly half.


Listen to this article – powered by AI:


New data released by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities has revealed a 32% increase in London’s rough sleepers in 2023 compared to the previous year.

This comes as London councils warn that local authority budgets are stretched. Spending reached £90m per month on temporary accommodation for homeless households in 2023. They have linked the problem to London’s renting crisis.

Alex Diner, Senior Researcher in Housing Policy at the New Economics Foundation said he was “not surprised” by the statistics. He blames London’s homelessness problem on a lack of affordable housing:

“We build fewer social homes than we sell every year. The pool is getting smaller.

“Landlords over the past couple of decades have had a licence to print money.”

‘This is a set of clear, political choices’

Though provisions were made to get rough sleepers off the streets during the pandemic, the data shows that homelessness has returned to the pre-Covid levels. Mr Diner said the realities that underpin homelessness – rising rent and a lack of social housing provision – haven’t gone away.

“It distils how this is a set of clear, political choices. A government that took this seriously would continue to take the action required irrespective of whether there’s a global pandemic or not.”

Mr Diner says that no-fault evictions, which allow landlords to evict tenants without cause, are also part of the issue. The Government is under increasing pressure from campaigners to abolish no-fault evictions after the Conservatives pledged to do so in 2019.

This week, the Renters’ Reform Coalition accused the Government of outsourcing the Bill on rental reform to “landlord backbenchers”. It said the ban on Section 21 no-fault evictions is now “even further into the long grass”.

Mr Diner says that the statistics of street homelessness will continue to rise as the cost of rent increases and no-fault evictions are not abolished.