Islington Council has purchased huge swathes of temporary accommodation as it attempts to get a grip on soaring demand for homelessness support, a recent report has claimed.
By Josef Steen, Local Democracy Reporter
Islington Council has purchased huge swathes of temporary accommodation as it attempts to get a grip on soaring demand for homelessness support, a recent report has claimed.
Council papers published this week state that the North London borough council has bought 820 properties for people facing homelessness to date – equivalent to one tenth of all properties purchased for temporary accommodation (TA) in England.
The majority of properties purchased were former council homes sold off under Right to Buy, which the council has bought back through tens of millions in grant and capital funding. In July, Islington’s executive committed a further £58 million for buybacks.
But the extraordinary purchase programme has yet to make a dent in the acute rise in demand for homelessness support. Though the council claims to be running the second-cheapest service in the capital, by its own admission it has at the same time the third-highest number of people seeking help from the local authority because they are facing homelessness.
Since December 2025, the number of households in TA has risen by 10 per cent, leaving one in every 60 Islington households, including nearly 1,839 children, waiting for either secure private accommodation or social housing. However, this is significantly lower than the London average of 1 in 50 households.
Despite the stark figures, the council has hailed the successes of its property acquisition programme (PAP), a cornerstone of its “spend to save” scheme.
Since housing benefit subsidies match the rents charged to house people in TA, the buybacks have been cost-neutral for the council, the authority claims. Reports say this has allowed Islington to avoid up to £17 million it would have otherwise spent on private rents in the last two years.
At a housing scrutiny meeting on Wednesday (September 2), Ian Swift, Director of Housing Operations, said that together with other measures like reserving two-thirds of social lets for homeless households, the council had saved nearly £29m in the last two years from its total homelessness prevention budget.
Cllr Hannah McHugh (Labour) added that without grant funding from the government and the Greater London Authority, the cost to the council would be “absolutely astronomical”.
This week’s update follows a council report on the borough’s homelessness crisis in March, which stated that Islington had prevented roughly 1,000 households from becoming homeless in a single year, and the average stay TA locally is around 10 – 11 months, “far shorter than in many neighbouring boroughs where families can remain in temporary accommodation for years”.
As nine London boroughs have been forced to seek Exceptional Financial Support from the government due to eye-watering homelessness spending, Islington achieved a £750,000 underspend at the end of the fiscal year 2025/26, which it has put down to its prevention policies.
