It comes two years after a peak of 360 families were stuck living in hotel rooms, reports James Cracknell

Cabinet member for housing Ayten Guzel (inset) and Enfield Travelodge, one of the hotels frequently used for housing homeless families from 2022-2024

Enfield Council’s housing boss has confirmed that the civic centre has ended the use of hotels to house homeless families.

The “major milestone” has been reached two years after as many as 360 households were stuck living in hotel rooms – temporary accommodation widely recognised as unsuitable, especially for families with children.

An exponential rise in the use of hotels to house homeless families from mid-2022 onwards also led to a financial crisis at the civic centre, with the council spending several hundreds of thousands of pounds every single month on hotel room bookings.

Some were stuck in hotels for months on end, with the Dispatch meeting several families throughout 2023 in such situations – including a disabled man and his wife and children who were made homeless following a fire and ended up living in various hotels for 18 months.

The crisis led to the council changing its policy on homelessness, with only single offers of housing being made before the authority would ‘discharge its duty’ to house them, and with these offers often meaning families would be housed in the far north of England, such as Hartlepool and Durham.

As well as this stricter homelessness policy, which essentially forced many families to live hundreds of miles away from Enfield, it was also recently revealed that the council has been making “incentive” payments to local landlords to encourage them to remove their properties from the private market and instead strike a deal with the council to house homeless families.

Such payments totalled £2.7million in 2024, according to campaign group Generation Rent – although this cost was still much lower than the sums that had been spent on hotel room bookings in 2023.

Enfield Council has credited “new and improved funding” from central government for helping to eliminate the use of hotels and also cites improved advice services, tenancy support and links to employment, mental health and wellbeing services, which it says are helping residents stay in their homes and secure longer-term stability.

Digital tools such as AdviceAid offer “tailored self-help housing advice”, while a new data intelligence tool has helped to identify at-risk families, who have been provided with updated information and guidance on evictions, rent arrears and managing finances.

Ayten Guzel, the council’s cabinet member for housing, said: “Every family should live in a decent and stable home. This is a significant achievement for Enfield. By focusing on prevention, support and long-term solutions, we have been able to end the use of hotels for temporary accommodation.

“Our priority is to help families avoid homelessness in the first place and to secure stable homes where they can thrive.”

In addition, a childcare support campaign targeting households with children aged between two and five years saw 255 households move out of arrears, benefitting more than 1,000 children and increasing benefit incomes by £113 per household, on average.

However, the council also admits that a “lack of genuinely affordable housing and a stalled rental market” continues to be an acute issue for London. In the last six months, the civic centre has seen around 400 households reaching out as homeless each month.

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