Get the data: Britain’s housing turmoil in numbers

Fragile housing: Bureau data reveals the huge cost of homelessness. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Amid rising rents, housing benefit caps and a lack of affordable homes, a team of Bureau journalists spent over four months researching the true cost and scale of the UK’s housing crisis.

We attempted to find:

• The gross cost of placing people in temporary accommodation, including bed and breakfast (B&B) facilities, in the UK’s 12 biggest cities.

• The number of households each London borough moved outside its own boundaries on an annual basis.

• The boroughs, towns and cities that London councils are moving people to when they cannot provide housing within their own boundaries.

The findings show that in the past four years councils in the UK’s 12 largest cities have spent almost £2bn on providing short-term housing and rehoused 32,643 households out of their borough. We also have revealed the places where London places move their households to.

But dig into the data sets and behind the headlines, fascinating local trends emerge. Every London council has a different story to tell.

See all three data sets here.

Click here to download the data on the cost of short-term housing

Click here to download the data on the households moved from their boroughs

Click here to download the data on where councils are sourcing new properties  

For more information on how we assembled the data, see our methodology.

Related story – How we did it: Tracking the housing crisis