Scale of the exodus
London councils are illegally moving vulnerable families – including women fleeing domestic abuse and refugees who speak little English – hundreds of miles away to cheap properties in some of the poorest parts of England, according to High Court rulings, official data, and evidence from MPs and charities.
The number of homeless households forced out of the capital has doubled in the past two years. Official figures show about 1,300 households were moved out of London by councils in the year to March 2025, up from 670 in the year to March 2023. Housing charities say the true figure is much higher because families placed directly into private rented accommodation may not appear in the statistics. London boroughs now house 73,310 homeless households in temporary accommodation – a record high, up 12% from the previous year.
Scores of families with children have been moved to towns including Bolton, Blackpool, Hartlepool, and areas of County Durham and County Durham. The Derbyshire-based company Reloc8 alone claims to have moved more than 400 homeless households out of London – 180 in a six-month period, nearly one a day, which it described as a 70% increase on the previous six months. Croydon council signed a £1m contract with Reloc8 last summer; Enfield council has paid more than £894,000 to the firm since August 2023. In 2023, 94% of Enfield’s offers to homeless families were outside London, with 59% in north-east England.
Impact on families and communities
Charities describe the practice as “inhumane”. Families are sometimes given as little as 24 hours to accept a move or face eviction from emergency housing. An Albanian woman who fled a sex trafficking gang in Manchester was unlawfully told to move from Ealing, west London, to a property 260 miles away in County Durham, despite being highly vulnerable and having two young children. When she raised concerns, Ealing council gave her details of two sex trafficking support organisations it said were in County Durham – one was in Durham, North Carolina, in the United States, and the other in Durham, Ontario, Canada. She won a High Court battle last year. “I was crying because I was really stressed. I felt they didn’t care,” she said.
In another case, a woman and her two children were moved 250 miles from Uxbridge, west London, to a barely furnished house outside Darlington the day after she was discharged from hospital. The head of the local Citizens Advice bureau said they had been “left to fend for themselves”.
MPs say the sudden arrival of these families is fuelling community division in areas already struggling with long waits for social housing. Jonathan Brash, the Labour MP for Hartlepool, said families were being “bundled into taxis in the middle of the night with little more than the clothes on their backs” and that the council only heard about it when they turned up at the door looking for help. “It’s cruel in the extreme,” he said. Grahame Morris, the Labour MP for Easington, accused London councils of “coercion” and called for sanctions against those acting unlawfully. Mary Kelly Foy, the Labour MP for City of Durham, described the policy as “inhumane”.
Liz Wyatt, of Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, said the number of families sent from London to north-east England rose from one in 2017 to at least 38 in 2023 and is expected to have risen further. “It’s pure cruelty,” she said. “It feels that housing officers target the most vulnerable people who [often] don’t speak English as their first language. It’s totally irresponsible because refugees are being sent to places where there were racist riots in the streets [in summer 2024].”
Legal obligations and how they are circumvented
Under the Housing Act 1996, local authorities have a duty to provide accommodation for eligible homeless households who have a priority need – a category that includes pregnant women, people with dependent children, and victims of domestic abuse. Section 208 of the Act requires that accommodation be provided within the council’s own area “so far as reasonably practicable”. If it must be outside, the council is legally obliged to notify the receiving authority. A Supreme Court judgment in 2015 reinforced that out-of-borough placements should be “as close as possible” to the original area to maintain support networks, education and access to services.
Despite this, several London councils have been found by the High Court to have acted unlawfully in recent years. Housing lawyers, charities, MPs and council leaders say some are routinely flouting the law. “We’re seeing more and more councils paying a year or two in rent to a private landlord and doing it off the books,” said the leader of one northern council.
One key mechanism is the use of intermediary companies. Reloc8 advertises that it only requires landlords to “have the minimum of a cooker and fridge freezer” and adds: “In certain cases we may also ask you to provide beds.” In a statement, Reloc8 said all its properties were inspected to comply with regulations and that it had “many success stories” over the years involving those who had been moved.
Croydon council plans to move about 110 homeless households under its Reloc8 contract. It estimates it will save about £5,000 for each placement and make further savings by ending its homelessness duties to those who refuse. Internal council documents show officials raised concerns that the scheme risked “compounding existing disadvantage” for vulnerable people due to the “disruption of support networks, continuity of education, access to familiar health and cultural services, and digital exclusion”. The £1m contract was signed after the council agreed to mitigate those concerns by requiring Reloc8 staff to undertake “cultural competence and anti-racism training”, according to official documents.
Sophie Earnshaw, a solicitor at the housing charity Shelter, said: “The law is clear: councils have a responsibility to accommodate families who become homeless in their local area – when this is not feasible, they must secure accommodation as close by as possible. Instead, some councils are paying private companies, like Reloc8, to move families up to hundreds of miles away from their local area. Against a backdrop of a chronic shortage of social rented homes and eye-watering private rents, it is families who are being left to bear the brunt of the housing emergency.”
The housing crisis in London is particularly acute: the capital accounts for more than half of England’s homeless people, and only 2% of private properties in London were affordable to someone receiving housing benefit, according to a 2023 report. The freezing of Local Housing Allowance rates has been identified as a major factor, with rents far outstripping benefit levels. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has warned councils about their legal duties. The Labour government has pledged a new cross-government homelessness strategy to halve long-term rough sleeping by 2029 and reduce the number of families in temporary accommodation, but critics point to the continued freeze on housing benefit as a barrier.
A separate voluntary scheme, the Greater London Authority’s “Seaside and Country Homes” initiative, allows Londoners aged 55 and over in social housing to move to coastal and rural areas, freeing up homes in the capital. That scheme is distinct from the coercive out-of-borough placements documented by court cases and official figures.
London Councils, which represents the capital’s 32 boroughs, said most placements were to counties bordering London but called on the government to do more to tackle “unsustainable” homelessness. It said it had met with council colleagues in the north-east to discuss the issues they were experiencing.
Enfield and Ealing councils said they were battling a “severe” housing crisis and denied breaching the Housing Act, saying they always notified other local authorities when homeless people were moved. Enfield denied targeting non-English speaking people, saying it “does not discriminate” against those seeking help.
