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Focus on Liverpool: improving outcomes
The importance of data and investment in Liverpool City Council’s temporary accommodation journey
STRATEGY
Andrew Leigh
Director of Housing, Liverpool City Council
Andrew Leigh
Director of Housing, Liverpool City Council
Issue 83 | April 2026
Liverpool is not unique in experiencing homelessness pressures and rising numbers in Temporary Accommodation (TA) but the City does have some particular issues in addressing these challenges.
Crisis-driven response
The service had been under-resourced since the pandemic, becoming overwhelmed by unsustainable levels of demand. This had created a reactive, crisis-driven response with a poor customer experience. Overwhelmed officers drove up sickness absences, further creating a vicious cycle within the service.
The systems and processes did not support the service – spreadsheets had proliferated and there was no one record of the numbers in households in TA, but various versions of the truth with households ‘getting lost in the system’. The length of stay of households with children in B&B or hotel-style accommodation often breached the statutory six-week limit. The quality and integrity of our data was low and it was near impossible to know the numbers in TA.
The City has no Housing Revenue Account and had relied on a significant number of nightly paid, B&B and hotel-style accommodation to meet rising demand, which had fuelled rising costs. Our demand for TA had even created bidding wars between providers for the same properties and temporary accommodation costs had risen from £1.4 million in 2019/20 to £30 million in 2024/25, contributing to the significant financial challenges facing the council.
“[Liverpool’s] temporary accommodation costs had risen from £1.4 million in 2019/20 to £30 million in 2024/25.”
Transforming the service
We recognised this could not continue. We have progressed a significant transformation programme over the past 18 months. This focuses on moving from a reactive, crisis-driven response to a prevention-focused service. We have delivered the programme through four workstreams: prevention; policy; supply and contracting; move-on and positive outcomes, with the use of data as a cross-cutting theme.
Getting a grip on the quality and integrity of data was key. The involvement in the government’s test and learn programme was a great opportunity to work collaboratively with Cabinet Office colleagues – who brought surge capacity – to address data quality and to build a performance framework initially focused on three priorities: cost; triage backlog; and B&B usage.
We have now put a weekly service review meeting in place, enabling us to use data to drive actions and test and learn from ideas, and to build a shared accountability across the service. The team has risen to the challenge – cutting the average nightly rate from more than £83 in January 2025 to £57 in February 2026, reducing the overall use of B&B and hotel-style accommodation and replacing it with self-contained accommodation. We have also seen a reduction in the number of households with children in B&B for more than six weeks, from over 80 in January 2025 to 0 in February 2026.
Building on this, we are also pioneering a new approach to tackling homelessness. By working with accommodation providers who will be contracted to convert 50% of their temporary accommodation into permanent homes at Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rents, we will be providing households with the opportunity to stay in a property and offering a supply of housing at LHA rates to discharge duty into it. This will continue to drive down our costs and builds on other initiatives to reduce the number of households in TA. These include a direct matching initiative with our Registered Provider partners and an additional onsite support service for single households who were previously in expensive hotels.
average nightly rate in January 2025
average nightly rate in February 2026
0
households with children spent more than six weeks in TA in February 2026, compared with more than 80 in January 2025
Meeting demand
We have grown our teams from 27 to 103 officers through an additional £1.9 million investment into the homelessness function. This includes specific teams that support a preventative approach to homelessness, by working with specific groups and officers dealing with day-to-day homeless presentations – again with the aim of keeping households in their homes. This investment has also included dedicated data and quality officers.
The number of homeless applications continues to increase – now averaging more than 1000 per month – but we are now intervening earlier. In 2023/24, fewer than 20% of households assessed were owed a prevention duty. In our latest figures for February 2026 over 50% of households were owed a prevention duty and we are seeing an increase in successful prevention outcomes compared to 2025.
The quality and integrity of data have been transformational in driving our improvement journey and in testing it and tweaking it.
The journey is not over, with continuing rising demand and challenging financial targets to drive down overall costs. But with a clear vision, accountability and strong leadership driving cultural change, as well as the positive outcomes we have seen so far, the team is up for the challenge.
“The number of homeless applications continues to increase – now averaging more than 1000 per month – but we are now intervening earlier.”
