Recent headlines about falling rough sleeping figures in London should be welcomed. Between January and March 2026, 3,944 people were recorded as sleeping rough in the capital, an 11% decrease on the previous year and the largest percentage reduction since 2018 outside of the exceptional Covid period. The number of people sleeping rough for the first time also fell by 15%.

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While these figures matter, they risk creating a misleading impression of the current homeless situation in the UK. Homelessness has not fallen, it is simply becoming less visible. 

At the end of 2025, there were 176,130 children living in temporary accommodation across England. This was the twelfth consecutive record high, and a 6% increase on the previous year. At the same time, 134,210 households were living in temporary accommodation overall.

Even the government’s own homelessness data points to a more complicated picture than a straightforward reduction in need. Between October and December 2025, the number of households accepted as being owed a main homelessness duty fell by more than 11%. The number of households approaching councils also declined. On paper, this could suggest that preventative measures are working. But, it could equally reflect something more concerning; rising thresholds for support, increased pressure on Local Authorities, and a lack of dignity within the system. 

The homelessness support system is not always approached by many groups experiencing homelessness, particularly young people, refugees, and people moving between insecure forms of housing. Others disengage after previous experiences of being told there is little available support. A reduction in people owed duties does not necessarily mean homelessness has been resolved. It may instead mean that homelessness is becoming increasingly hidden.

This matters because rough sleeping statistics, while important, capture only one part of the crisis. Temporary accommodation, sofa surfing, overcrowded housing, insecure private rentals, and repeated displacement all sit outside the public image many people still associate with homelessness.

Increasingly, temporary accommodation is sitting at the heart of the crisis.

Local authorities are now spending huge proportions of their homelessness budgets managing temporary accommodation pressures rather than preventing homelessness upstream. In some areas, councils are reportedly spending up to 60% of homelessness prevention grant funding on temporary accommodation itself. That should raise serious questions about what “prevention” currently means in practice.

Temporary accommodation was never designed to function as a long-term housing solution. Yet for many families, it now effectively has become one.

Families regularly spend years living in single-room accommodation, often without adequate cooking facilities, privacy, storage space, or stability. Children are uprooted from schools, separated from support networks, and forced to grow up in environments that undermine nearly every aspect of healthy development. Previous research has shown that many families in temporary accommodation are living in housing that fails to meet basic standards, while a third of parents report their child does not even have a bed of their own.

There is also a risk that falling numbers of rough sleeping begins to blur the extent of broader structural pressures driving homelessness in the UK. The causes of homelessness have not disappeared. Rents remain unaffordable, a lack of genuinely affordable housing supply drives people away from support systems, and Local Housing Allowance rates remain frozen against market realities. 

The implementation of the Renters’ Rights Act and the ban on Section 21 evictions is an important and welcome shift. But legislation alone does not help someone secure a deposit, furnish an unfurnished tenancy, cover rent in advance, or bridge the gap between housing costs and income. Nor does it automatically move families out of temporary accommodation and into stable homes.

This is where homelessness policy often becomes trapped in a reactive cycle: spending vast sums managing crisis after it has already escalated, while underinvesting in the flexible interventions that could prevent instability earlier.

If we are serious about reducing homelessness, we need to be careful about which indicators we choose to celebrate in isolation.

Fewer people sleeping rough matters enormously. But homelessness cannot be understood purely through what is visible on the street.

A system where record numbers of children are growing up in temporary accommodation is not a system that has solved homelessness. It is a system that has, in many cases, relocated it behind closed doors.

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