Labor-guided Enfield Council left 100 families homelessly after refusing to move | Housing

A working time London The council had more than 100 families homeless last year after they refused to be relocated outside the district observer can reveal.

Freedom of information from around 80% of the English councils show that they have ended their legal tasks to 615 households who rejected residential offers outside the local authority in 2024 – but this national total is severely distorted.

Labor-Lun Enfield was responsible for 115 cases, the highest everywhere and made almost a fifth of all cases in England. It comes as the advice tries to buy the housing buildings in Liverpool Homeless families move there.

The councils have legal obligations to support and re -raise homeless people, but they can terminate these tasks if a household rejects an “reasonable” range of housing.

This offer must be affordable, but the councils have it More scope for the situationAnd the crisis on the affordability of living space in London and other high -acting areas has laid a large number of homeless people across the country.

Enfield recently followed a particularly aggressive approach. A report Published last year Due to housing Southwark and Lambeth (Hasl), it was found that 94% of the Enfield Council offers were 59% of 59% on homeless for the homeless in 2023 in the northeast. Perhaps three quarters of their offers were rejected, the highest rejection rate of a London council.

“It is outrageous,” said the housing and union activist Paul Kershaw, based in Enfield, to the observer. “These are people who will have families – they can be vulnerable, and as far as the council is concerned, they are only torn away from their social connections and sent to completely inappropriate places.”

“They have families here with children and everything, and what happens is that all their community networks collapse,” added Charith Gunawardena, a former city council of Enfield, who has passed from workers to the Greens, partly due to dissatisfaction with the council’s housing policy.

“If you only move people to the north, where you have no community connections or have never lived in these areas, you have a house, but everything else has broken.”

The rising costs for temporary accommodations for homeless people pressed Enfield’s finances and triggered a reaction from council members.

At a council meeting in September 2023, Duane Dyer, director of improving the apartment of the Enfield Council, explained a stricter approach to homeless households, which would enable fewer options for alternative apartments. “We will enforce our guideline hard line”, ” He told the meeting. “I think the weakness is that we were not as difficult as we should have been.”

“I was horrified that they could possibly imagine that they were not hard enough for people who are desperate,” said Matt Burn of Campaign Group Better Homes Enfield. “We have a very important problem with regard to our homelessness. It mostly comes from the apartment use cap -[people] You simply cannot afford private rents, and the apartment benefit does not cover you.

“Sooner or later you will be exhibited with a evacuation announcement, and you will then present yourself to the Council as shortly before homelessness.”

Part of the problem is that the more expensive districts of the inner London have long moved their homeless households to Enfield with their own housing crises, which led to an increase in rents and the housing stocks that Enfield may otherwise have used for their own homeless.

But Enfield has also not managed to build enough social apartments. His restless meridian water regeneration program had initially not planned a socially rented houses for the first two phases, although the council told him observer This position has changed and social living space is now part of the program.

A spokesman for the Enfield Council said: “To ensure that the residents have access to safe, long -term and stable houses, we made the difficult but necessary decision, which were adopted by other London local authorities to examine the opportunity to buy a small number of residential properties in more affordable areas.

“If possible, we continue to look for apartment solutions closer to Enfield. We focus on the construction of houses. We will continue to work with the government to satisfy our living needs. “