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In the wake of judicial exasperation at councils’ behaviour and Inside Housing’s exposure of the scale of the issue, just what on earth is happening with out of area homeless placements? Daniel Douglas has a closer look.

When council officers are telling barefaced lies about whether they moved homeless families into other boroughs, you know things have got pretty bad.

A case from two weeks ago has set out in painstaking detail – phone conversations, letters, emails - an example of this happening. A vulnerable family, including a young girl of 2 years and 11 months and a 12-week-old boy, found themselves stuck in the middle of a legal row between two London boroughs over who was responsible for their care and accommodation costs.

The judgement describes how the family were ‘pushed from pillar to post’ by the councils, as they both refused to take responsibility for the household. At one point the family found itself on the streets, with Havering then putting them up in a hotel over the weekend in July last year.

So why is this happening at all? First, a run through of what happened in the High Court case.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

A homelessness manager from Tower Hamlets council ‘gave obviously misleading information’, court papers show, when she told an officer from Havering that Tower Hamlets ‘had no previous involvement with the family and no assessment was carried out’.

This was, in no uncertain terms, a lie. In fact, Tower Hamlets had placed the family in Havering two months earlier.

The situation got so out of hand that the family had to take their case to the High Court to resolve. The judgement explains how a lawyer from Havering Council wrote to the solicitors representing the family, saying: ‘this is a clear case of attempting to dump responsibility for assessment and provision by transferring homeless clients out of the borough from which they originate.’

The judge says that the ‘persistent and endemic failures’ of local authorities to co-operate on issues such as this ‘have regrettably resulted in vulnerable families being without support or services’.

‘Judicial statements don’t really get much more damning than this,’ said Giles Peaker, partner at Anthony Gold solicitors. ‘The judge is completely exasperated. What’s clear is that this is not a few forgotten households; it’s a widespread, continual failure to meet legal requirements.

‘From what I’ve heard from senior homelessness council officers, there is a major issue with notification. The risk is clearly that people will fall through the net.’

But whilst this case goes into microscopic detail on what is happening and what the effect is on human lives, Inside Housing’s research last week revealed the scale of the problem – some 8,000 families sent out of area without notification.

It’s difficult to know just how many families are being moved out of area without sufficient legal notification. The number could be significantly higher than Inside Housing’s figure of 8,000. It’s also possible that for some of those 8,000 families, notification is being sent, but does not fully satisfy the legal requirements.

London Councils’ ‘Notify’ system, a discretionary and voluntary database system for notification, is used by all London boroughs. It asks for the surname and size of household, the property postcode, the price paid for accommodation and whether the children are on the Child Protection Register.

However, Section 208 of the Housing Act 1996 asks for other information. It asks for the actual address of the property, the date the accommodation was provided and for what legal duty is discharged through the placement. And, crucially, the notice must be given with 14 days.

Jan Luba QC, a leading barrister on housing law, who represented the Tower Hamlets family, said: ‘Failure to issue a prompt notice in writing - containing all of the information required by section 208 of the Housing Act 1996 - is unlawful. Councils not giving such written notices within 14 days are plainly breaking the law. If a council’s current arrangements mean some of their notices are not given within 14 days, those arrangements need to be changed.’

But why are these out of area placements even being made at all?

Under pressure

At the beating heart of London’s housing crisis lies the borough of Westminster. Council documents show that the council ships half of its homeless families out of area to other parts of London – and sometimes beyond, as shown in a recent Supreme Court judgement (LINK TO NZOLAMESO).

One councillor, Paul Dimoldenberg, said he has been concerned about this issue for quite some time. But why is Westminster moving people out of area in the first place?

‘Well they’re clearly doing it because it’s cheaper,’ says Mr Dimoldenberg. ‘It’s a simple matter of keeping costs down. My concern is that Westminster itself may well be keeping its costs down but it’s heaping costs on receiving areas.’

Mr Dimoldenberg said he understood that the borough moved out more than 1,000 families last year, mainly to other parts of London rather than out of London completely. That means 1,000 properties in other London boroughs that other local authorities cannot use for their homeless families, and so they must search further afield.

Looking through some of the FOI responses Inside Housing received, it’s clear how the problem of available accommodation ripples outwards. Westminster’s families take up inner London properties, and inner London councils sent their families to outer London.

Hammersmith and Fulham sent out 572 families in 2013 and 384 families in the year to October 2014, their FOI response states. Where exactly all the families are moving from and to has never been exposed by the media in comprehensive detail.  

The representative body London Councils expressed concern over London boroughs competing for the same accommodation for homeless families, warning that councils were, in at least some circumstances ‘outbidding’ each other for accommodation. The extent to which this still occurs has also not yet been exposed. 

It’s pitting one council against the other in their attempt to secure accommodation,’ Mr Dimoldenberg said. ‘There’s a huge effect on the families, in my personal experience. The destruction it causes to education for children. We know quite a few families, if their child’s education is at a critical time, try and stay at the school in Westminster.

‘It’s also creating the conditions where it’s impossible to get a job. There are people I have come across who have had jobs in central London and, after being moved, costs have made it impossible to keep that job.’

As long as the housing affordability crisis in London continues to get worse, out of area placements will keep rising.

When the Coalition government came into power, its 2010 Emergency Budget announced a series of benefit changes, including a benefit cap and dropping local housing allowance (LHA) from the 50^th to the 30th percentile of broad rental market area (BRMA) rents.

Put simply, this moved the highest level of housing benefit from including half of all rental property in an area to less than one third. It was after these changes were implemented that out of area placements began to spike.

In October 2010, responding to fears at the time over social cleansing, mayor of London Boris Johnson said on BBC London radio that ‘the last thing we want to have in our city is a situation such as Paris where the less well-off are pushed out to the suburbs.

‘I’ll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together. On my watch, you are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living and have put down roots.’

Sadly, this is exactly the legacy of the last five years.

Joined up work

The issue, as everyone who has spoken to Inside Housing has made clear, is not just councils behaving badly (although, as the court cases mentioned above show, this is partly true).

Instead, London’s boroughs have found themselves in an impossible situation, where they must fight among each other for available accommodation and move families miles away from their homes on an unprecedented scale.

It’s not surprising then, that some, such as Paul Price, corporate director at Tendring Council, and Mr Dimoldenber, are now calling for central government intervention over out of area placements.

London Councils has told Inside Housing that it is updating its Notify system and reviewing the High Court judgement during this process. But concerns about flaws in the Notify system must be urgently addressed.

Nobody from London Councils would comment on the issue of out of area placements due to ‘political sensitivity’ around pre-election period. And London Councils didn’t respond to questions about the information shared on Notify and what it contains.

With so many hidden families across the capital, and such a patchy communication network, it is only a matter of time before a case of serious abuse or death emerges.