Brighton & Hove’s housing crisis is now a council-wide family emergency

Brighton & Hove has crossed another threshold: 2,358 households were in temporary accommodation on 5 October, above the previous five-year high of 2,292 recorded in June.¹

That is not simply a story about a council struggling to find enough rooms. It is evidence that a supposedly exceptional safety net has become a parallel housing system, absorbing families who cannot secure a permanent home.

The scale is visible in the people behind the household count. Almost 3,600 people in the city were estimated to be experiencing homelessness, including 1,400 children.¹

Children do not experience temporary accommodation as an administrative category. They experience moves, uncertainty and a childhood organised around the shortage of housing.

The pressure is also landing directly on local government. Brighton & Hove assessed nearly 50 households a week as homeless and in need of housing during the first half of the year.¹

Councils are being asked to manage the consequences of rents, low supply and inadequate incomes while having limited power over the underlying market. The result is a costly cycle: emergency placements consume money that could otherwise support prevention and permanent supply.

The council expects to spend £15.2m on temporary housing in 2026-27, above its £14.6m budget.¹

Officials say demand will keep rising without intervention, and the council’s own forecast is for as many as 2,860 households to need temporary housing by 2029-30.¹

This is not a Brighton anomaly that can be filed under local mismanagement. Across England, 135,580 families were living in temporary accommodation in March 2026, including 177,530 children.²

But the direction is clear. Housing failure is reaching children, working households and the everyday machinery of government.

Brighton’s proposed programme to add 500 temporary homes, backed by £16.4m in government funding to buy properties, may ease the immediate shortage.¹ It does not answer the larger question: when does emergency accommodation stop being a bridge and become the country’s unplanned housing policy?