Exclusive: Data gathered by Generation Rent shows 37 councils spent £31m in 2024-25 in one-off payments to individual landlords
Councils across England are increasingly spending millions of pounds a year in incentive payments to private landlords to persuade them to house homeless families, with campaigners describing it as a “senseless waste of public money”.
Data gathered by the campaign group Generation Rent via freedom of information requests showed that 37 councils spent more than £31m on one-off cash payments to private landlords on 10,792 occasions in 2024-25.
