Kent Councils’ Out-of-Area Temporary Accommodation: The FOI Numbers

When a council accepts that a household is homeless, it often has to find “temporary accommodation” fast. That can mean anything from a hotel or B&B to a short-term private let while longer-term housing is found. “Out-of-area” temporary accommodation means that stop-gap placement is outside the council’s own district.

We sent the same Freedom of Information request to every district and borough council in Kent, asking for simple, aggregated totals: how many households were placed out of area, how many involved children, how many Section 208 notifications were sent/received, and what the out-of-area bill looked like.

Nine councils supplied at least some data in the responses they provided. Three did not respond at all to the FoI: Canterbury City Council, Thanet District Council and Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council.

The headline numbers for 2024/25 are stark, even though the picture is incomplete because not every council provided a full, comparable set of totals. Across the eight councils that did provide a full 2024/25 count of out-of-area households, the combined figure was 1,256 households placed out of district at some point in the year. Of those, 623 were households with children — just under half.

The biggest out-of-area user in the 2024/25 figures provided was Dartford: 518 out-of-borough households, including 265 households with children. Next came Swale (183 total; 77 with children), Dover (148; 59), Sevenoaks (141; 61), Gravesham (94; 77), Folkestone & Hythe (68; 42), and then Ashford and Tunbridge Wells (both 52 total — but with very different “with children” counts: Ashford 28, Tunbridge Wells 14).

One point jumps off the page if you read this as a family story, not a spreadsheet. In some places, families make up the bulk of the out-of-area caseload. Gravesham reported 94 out-of-area households in 2024/25, and 77 of those were households with children. That doesn’t tell us the distance of each placement — but it does tell us how often “temporary” still means uprooting a family.

The FOI returns also show how unevenly councils can report the basic “accounting” of homelessness pressure. Folkestone & Hythe explicitly warns that its 2023/24 out-of-area household numbers are incomplete:

“For financial year 2023/24 the Council cannot provide the full information for households placed in out-of-area accommodation. This is due to the change in the Housing Options and Allocations IT System.”

It adds:

“The information provided for 2023/24 is all that we hold for this period but it is incomplete. The information provided for 2024/25 and 01/04/2025 to 31/12/2025 is complete.”

Section 208 notifications are supposed to help councils manage the real-world consequences of placements that land in someone else’s patch: links to services, pressures on housing and, in many cases, the practicalities that come with households arriving from elsewhere. A Section 208 notification is, in plain terms, the formal alert a council should send to the host local authority when it places a homeless household in that host area.

But again, reporting is patchy. Folkestone & Hythe says it cannot report how many Section 208 notifications it sent because “the Council is not able to run a report to see the numbers of s208 notifications sent out.” Swale says inbound notifications are “Data not held in a reportable format.” Dover’s reply is blunt on outbound notifications: “We send Section 208 notifications for each out of area placement but do not hold the information.” Tunbridge Wells gives a similar kind of answer on costs: “Information not held (temporary accommodation cost is not broken down to location of placement).”

Even so, the inbound (received) Section 208 totals that were reported are revealing because they show which Kent districts are hosting households placed by other authorities. In 2024/25, Dartford reported receiving 235 notifications and Gravesham 204. Maidstone’s appendix totals also show 235 notifications received in 2024/25. Folkestone & Hythe reported 76, while Sevenoaks reported 15.

Look inside those inbound lists and a second story emerges: London placements into Kent. Dartford’s 2024/25 inbound notifications were dominated by “Greenwich 124” and “Bromley 69”. Gravesham’s 2024/25 inbound list is led by “Greenwich 78” and “Bromley 57”. Folkestone & Hythe’s 2024/25 inbound notifications include heavy Kent-to-Kent movement too, led by “Dover 44”, alongside “Thanet 15” and “Canterbury 12”. Maidstone’s 2024/25 inbound list includes large entries such as “Medway 58”, “Ashford 47” and “Canterbury 47”. Whatever else is happening, these figures show Kent districts are not only exporting households out of their own boundaries — they are also absorbing significant numbers placed by neighbours and by London boroughs.

On costs, the responses help explain why residents so often hear about a “temporary accommodation bill” but struggle to get a clean “out-of-area” price tag. Several councils say the finance coding simply doesn’t separate in-district from out-of-district placements. Folkestone & Hythe says:

“The system the Finance Team use to track payments for temporary accommodation (TA) does not differentiate between TA placements in area and TA placements made out-of-area.”

Swale says:

“The invoices from providers are not separated by location of property so unable to calculate spend on out of area TA.”

Ashford goes further, explaining it would require manual review at scale and refusing the out-of-area cost breakdown on FOI cost-limit grounds.

Only two councils in the material supplied a specific gross spend total for out-of-area TA in 2024/25. Dartford reported gross out-of-borough TA expenditure of £3,983,328 in 2024/25 (with income/recoveries £1,158,933.90 and net cost £2,824,394.50). Sevenoaks reported gross out-of-area TA expenditure of £766,516 in 2024/25, and marked income/recoveries as “Not held”. These two figures don’t magically solve the Kent-wide picture — because most councils didn’t (or couldn’t) provide the same out-of-area spend totals — but they do show what the bill looks like where systems can track it.

There is a final, unavoidable transparency point. Three councils did not respond in the set of responses you provided — Canterbury, Thanet and Tonbridge & Malling — yet Canterbury and Thanet appear repeatedly inside other councils’ inbound Section 208 lists. In other words, even when a council stays silent, its activity can still show up indirectly in someone else’s figures. That isn’t a substitute for a direct, accountable response — especially when the subject is families living “temporarily” in the wrong district, at very real human and financial cost.

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