Figures obtained by campaign group Generation Rent named Enfield as spending the most in London on such payments last year

Enfield Council has been named by a national housing campaign as spending the highest amount of money in London last year on “incentive payments” to private landlords.

Following a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests to all 32 London borough councils, Generation Rent revealed Enfield had spent by far the highest – £2.73million – on payments to landlords encouraging them to house homeless people in the financial year 2024/25.

According to this data, the second highest spender in London was Ealing Council, with £2.26m paid to private landlords. No other London council spent more than £2m and most spent well below £1m.

Generation Rent, which campaigns around housing justice issues in the UK, has been investigating the practice of local authorities paying private landlords cash payments to “incentivise them to house households who have approached the local authority as homelessness or threatened with homelessness”. These are one off payments, separate to housing benefits.

Enfield has been facing an acute housing crisis for several years, particularly in relation to the demand for temporary accommodation from families evicted from their homes or no longer able to rent privately. In mid-2023, the council was housing hundreds of families in hotels, and spending as much as £500,000 every month to companies such as Travelodge and Premier Inn as a result.

This 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.

The Dispatch now understands that this policy change has succeeded in removing all local families from hotels – but appears to have come at a cost in other respects, as revealed by Generation Rent.

The last time figures on landlord incentives were collected in the capital was 2018. Compared to then, the overall money spent by councils in London has increased by over £8.5million (54%).

Local campaign group Better Homes Enfield has suggested on social media that the council’s high level of spend on landlord incentives could have been “exacerbated by them signing up landlords for ten-plus years” which “enables them to charge higher rents, then claim money back via benefits”.

Enfield Council has not responded to a request for comment.

Ben Twomey, chief executive at Generation Rent, said: “Everyone needs a home, it’s the foundation of our lives. But the rental market is like the wild west. Landlords are often a law unto themselves, rigging the system to line their own pockets at the expense of people experiencing homelessness and the local councils that are trying to house them.

“The soaring cost of renting and the government’s decision to freeze the Local Housing Allowance [which sets housing benefit levels] has put councils across the country in a near impossible position.

“In a desperate bid to avoid placing people in temporary accommodation, they’re forced to pay individual landlords sometimes tens of thousands of pounds just for them to agree to rent out their home. It’s a senseless waste of our public money.

“The government’s housebuilding targets are welcome, but these findings show urgent action is needed to address the widening lack of affordable homes.

“The chancellor must unfreeze Local Housing Allowance in the upcoming autumn budget to give renters claiming benefits relief from towering household costs. Meanwhile, the government also must give metro mayors [such as Sadiq Khan] the power to limit rent increases through the upcoming Devolution Bill, allowing them to slam the brakes on sky-high rents in cities across England.”

Separate analysis from the homelessness charity Crisis found that just 2.5% of private rented homes in England were affordable for people claiming housing benefit in 2024.

A recent report from property website Rightmove also found the average monthly rent a new tenant faces paying is £417 more than in 2020, around £100 more than the average wage increase over the same period.

In Enfield, private rents have risen 10.2% in the last year alone, according to the Office for National Statistics.

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