Major councils change data collection on children in temporary accommodation after Inside Housing investigation

To create its quarterly dashboard on the numbers of families with babies and toddlers in temporary accommodation, Inside Housing filed FOIs to every local authority in the UK in January 2024.

A total of 60% of local authorities provided the data, while 32% refused or said they were unable to provide it.

In the latest update, which was requested in December 2024, 67% councils provided the data and 22% refused.

Sylvia Stoianova, a deputy programme director at the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), said: “We are extremely pleased that councils are now collecting and analysing this data, which will allow them to prioritise families accordingly.

“The NCMD continues to monitor the national data where temporary accommodation has been recorded as a contributory factor in the child death reviews. Gathering more and better data on this issue will be key to improving and saving children’s lives.”

The change was primarily in England, where 199 councils provided the data in the most recent round of FOIs, compared with 180 in spring 2024. Some of these changes were simply due to a mistaken refusal the first time, or a difference in judgement by the officer responsible.

However, a number include major councils, which confirmed they had changed their policy or system in the interim. These include: Westminster, Greenwich, Coventry, Luton and Brighton & Hove.

Brighton & Hove Council said its change was specifically down to Inside Housing’s investigation. After the initial FOI refusal, it reviewed the case to see if it would be possible to create a reporting tool to make the request possible in the future. As it has now done so, the local authority can now report on age-segregated temporary accommodation data. 

A spokesperson for Westminster Council, which the data shows has more than 800 families with children aged under five living in temporary accommodation, said: “The council has not changed the way we collect data, but we introduced a new system that has improved our analysis of the data we capture.”

Martin Donovan, housing and homelessness operational lead at Coventry Council, explained that prompted by the first FOI refusal, the local authority changed its data extraction process, which means it can now access the data. 

“There hasn’t been a change in policy or how we record data, however there has been a change in how we extract data,” he said.

“Between January 2024 and November 2024, we began reporting directly from information from the council’s data warehouse opposed to reporting directly from the housing ICT system.”

A spokesperson for Greenwich Council said: “We continually look for ways to be more efficient, and we now have systems in place to allow us to gather the requested data that would’ve previously exceeded resources.”