'Housing Londoners is heaping pressure on council'

Housing people from London put an Essex town under "massive pressure", a council leader claimed.

Dan Swords said Harlow Council was being beaten to temporary accommodation in the new town by London boroughs with more money.

It meant there was less shelter available for homeless people from Harlow, the Conservative said. He vowed to take a "robust and firm" approach in accepting homeless applications from the capital.

A London Councils spokesperson said "out-of-London placements are a minority" and added: "Boroughs only make placements outside London as a last resort or when the homeless household has a connection in the placing area."

Under previous measures to tackle homelessness in Harlow, 12 former office blocks were converted into 1,000 homes.

However, fire concerns have seen residents evacuated from two of those developments in the past 11 months.

Swords said the latest incident on Thursday compounded "significant pressure" felt by the council.

"Harlow has a particularly challenging problem because we've seen a huge number of, typically, London boroughs placing residents in temporary accommodation into Harlow," he told BBC Essex.

"Often, London boroughs will pay much more than Harlow Council is able to, to secure those properties."

Swords said it was then left to the council to support the new residents, as well as local NHS services and schools.

About 370 families were living in temporary accommodation in the town, he said, adding over the past five years, Harlow had seen annual rises in homelessness of 20%.

The council leader pledged to remind London authorities "very firmly" of their duties so he could prioritise people from Harlow.

"Our job as Harlow Council is to provide housing and do the very best we can for Harlow residents," he added.

"It is simply impossible for us to do that for London boroughs too, and we will be very robust and firm in that approach."

London Councils, a cross-party organisation that represents 32 borough councils and the City of London, said the capital faced the "most severe homelessness pressures in the country, accounting for more than half (56%) of England's homelessness figures".

It added that boroughs were aware that London's homelessness emergency is increasingly felt beyond its boundaries, and it was a "national emergency requiring a national response".

"Out-of-London placements are a minority of the overall number of placements made by boroughs," the spokesperson added.

"The latest available data shows that 12% of London placements were outside the capital. Given the worsening housing pressures in London, this has increased from typical historic levels of around 6-8%."

The organisation estimated that more than 183,000 Londoners were homeless and living in temporary accommodation arranged by their local borough, equivalent to one in 50 Londoners, and one in 21 children.

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