Proposal 

England is in the grip of a temporary accommodation emergency. Over 170,000 children are now living in temporary accommodation, at a cost of more than £2.8 billion a year. Ending long-term child homelessness is an achievable goal, and one we’ve aligned behind to unlock focused, collective action.

The ultimate solution is to accelerate social rent delivery: an estimated 90,000 additional social rent homes a year, for 15 years. Programmes like MHCLG’s Small Sites Aggregator are intended to support this, but a step-change of that scale will take time. In the meantime, we urgently need innovation and collective action to unlock a faster, more cost-effective response to a worsening crisis, for two reasons.

Bristol City Council and the London Borough of Havering have recently pioneered a promising alternative: quality, relocatable homes on under-used land, providing purpose-built TA on a meanwhile basis – safer, more suitable and more sustainable than much of the existing provision. We explored both pathfinder projects at a panel discussion hosted by Places for People on 2nd December 2025.

The Toolkit 

Following the panel discussion, Housing Festival, Places for People and a growing consortium of contributing partners, are producing a toolkit for local authorities/London Boroughs to aid them in appraising and replicating the relocatable and leaseback development models that have been piloted in Bristol and Havering. 

The new toolkit will consolidate best practice to enable scaling these solutions, and facilitate the rapid deployment of high-quality homes across the country to help ameliorate the TA crisis and improve the living conditions and outcomes of the thousands of households in TA.

As well as clearly defining the opportunity (specific to each statutory authority’s housing pressures, land availability and finance requirements), the toolkit will need to address the narrative, strategic, legal, financial, and management case to support local government colleagues from across different departments to socialise the solution, produce a robust business case, generate political support and form partnerships to enable delivery. 

Access the toolkit

This toolkit will be widely available in October 2026. 

The toolkit will be freely available to interested parties across client and supplier domains, downloadable from the members area of Building Better Community of Practice (BB:CoP) website. There is no paywall, but BB:CoP membership and sign-in will support ongoing access to secure file-storage, including the latest version of the toolkit, enabling updates and new case studies beyond 2026. 

Additionally, the Community of Practice will provide space for ongoing interaction and collaboration to support implementation and iteration of similar solutions.