Families in B&Bs beyond the six-week legal limit

What this doesn’t measure

Whether any individual placement is lawful — a council can be within the law while the stay is awaiting review — nor families in other unsuitable accommodation types. Small counts are suppressed per council, so council figures can be missing where the national figure is not.

Important caveat

These figures come from H-CLIC, the case-level system every English housing authority reports into, and count only households that approached their council and were dealt with under the homelessness legislation — not rough sleepers, not people who never approached, not informal arrangements. Counts are rounded to the nearest 10 and small counts are suppressed per council, so council figures do not sum exactly to England and a missing council figure means "too small to publish", not zero. Each quarter is published provisional and revised in later releases; some councils occasionally fail to submit and are imputed or omitted, which MHCLG notes in the release. Temporary-accommodation counts are a snapshot of the quarter's last day, and a household placed outside its own council's area is counted by the council that owes it the duty, not the council where it is living.

Release

January to March 2026 (provisional) · publication page

Last updated

13 August 2026

Next release expected

Not yet announced (estimated from the usual cadence)