£90m plan to house city's homeless

The cost of housing homeless people in Liverpool could be as much as £90m in the next few years.

Liverpool City Council said it had seen demand for temporary accommodation rise in recent years, in part due to cost-of-living pressures and so-called "no fault evictions".

While the council said it had managed to reduce the cost-per-night of putting people up, it needed to appoint a firm to manage housing up to 1,600 currently homeless families and individuals.

It is set to appoint multinational firm Perk UK to run the contract, at a cost of about £20m per year.

The council has been increasing the amount of self-contained accommodation to reduce its reliance on hotels.

There are now 1,330 units of self-contained accommodation in the city and the nightly rate is now typically £57, down from £83 previously.

This has led to a reduction in the use of hotels, down to 277 rooms - and no families now spend more than six weeks there before being moved to other accommodation.

Housing cabinet member Hetty Wood said the council was "taking proactive steps through a number of schemes to make sure we have enough units of accommodation to give them a roof over their head whilst they find somewhere more permanent".

Just under 1,200 Merseyside households have been evicted from their homes through no fault of their own in the last two years.

In 2024, so-called no-fault evictions were at a record high across the country and accounted for about half of the 1,977 notices served on tenants.

No-fault evictions allow a landlord to give a tenant notice that they must leave their home without having to demonstrate the tenant has done anything wrong such as failing to pay rent or damaging the property.

In 2019, the Conservative government announced it would be ending the evictions, which are legal under Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act.

They are due to be abolished next year.

But in the last year, they only accounted for about 14% of the evictions that took place on Merseyside.

A report to go before councillors on Tuesday said other factors in play were "family breakdowns and affordability concerns as rents increase and local housing allowance stay far below the market rents".

"This pressure is set against a challenging landscape that residents face with increasing economic demands and general health concerns all of which are contributing to the daily challenges faced by residents in securing and holding down suitable tenancies."

The council will contract Perk UK Ltd to "book and manage interim and temporary accommodation services" for two years, with the total value of the contract expected to be about £90m".

City leaders are also working on finding 1,500 temporary and permanent accommodation places over the next 18 months, which they said would drastically reduce demand for what they called "nightly-rate" accommodation.

Wood added: "We recognise that there also needs to be an increase in the supply of affordable homes and are working with Government agencies, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and social landlords to deliver affordable rent and rent-to-buy properties."

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