Local councils pay tens of millions a year on one-off incentive payments to private landlords to house the homeless, research from campaign group Generation Rent says.    

The body sent Freedom of Information requests to all 32 London councils that provide statutory homelessness services and the ten councils outside the capital with the biggest homeless responsibilities.   

The requests concerned local authorities paying private landlords cash payments to incentivise them to house households who have become homeless.  

“These are one-off payments, separate to housing benefit,” the body adds. 

Councils collectively paid private landlords incentives on 10,792 occasions in 2024/25, spending over £31m, averaged between the 37 authorities that responded. 

This is an average of 292 incentive payments a year for each council with an average annual spend of nearly £850,000.   

The top five councils with the highest annual spends were:   

• Manchester City Council – £3,345,411.95 

• Enfield Council – £2,730,337.42 

• Ealing Council – £2,259,913.77 

• Birmingham Council – £1,657,605 

• Nottingham Council – £1,595,276 

The top five highest single incentives paid to private landlords were:  

• Southwark Council – £15,385.44 

• Camden Council – £13,500 

• Hammersmith and Fulham Council – £13,000 

• Ealing Council – £11,367.42 

• Brent Council – £10,700 

In London, the 27 councils that responded spent over £24m on landlord incentives in the same period, an average spend of over £900k per council. 

The last time data on landlord incentives was collected in the capital was seven years ago.  

Compared to 2018, the overall money spent by councils in London has jumped 54% to £8.5m.  

Also, in 2018, only one London council reported paying an incentive of £10,000 or more. 

But now six London councils reported paying £10,000 or more for a single incentive payment. 

Generation Rent chief executive Ben Twomey says: “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 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 National Residential Landlords Association has also called for an uprating of the Local Housing Allowance and the end to the five-week wait for Universal Credit at the beginning of a claim. 

The association adds: “Private renting provides badly needed homes for vulnerable and low-income tenants.  

“The private rented sector has been increasingly relied on by tenants who are unable to access social housing due to a lack of supply.”