A piece of investigative journalism published this week by London Centric reporter Polly Smythe has thrown a sharp light on one of the more troubling unintended consequences of London's housing emergency. Westminster Council - itself trying to manage a spiralling temporary accommodation bill - has purchased a block of 32 private rental flats in Richmond and evicted the sitting tenants in the process. Those tenants may now present as homeless to Richmond Council, which then faces its own pressure to house them.
It's a story that tells us something important about where London's housing market currently sits: under enormous stress, with councils making reactive decisions that shift the problem rather than solve it.
Those numbers are worth sitting with. A fourteenfold increase in temporary accommodation costs in three years is not a trend - it's a structural failure. And Westminster is far from alone. Across London, boroughs are competing with each other, with the Home Office, and with private contractors to secure housing stock — often in other boroughs, often at the expense of whoever currently lives there.
A market distorted by emergency
What's emerged is a shadow housing market, running parallel to the ordinary private rental sector. Councils, driven by legal obligations to house priority homeless residents, are paying premium prices for properties with vacant possession. This creates a powerful incentive for landlords to clear sitting tenants. As one local councillor quoted in the article drily puts it, this has been dubbed "Azizification" - a reference to the high-profile mass evictions carried out by Criterion Capital.
"Councils need temporary accommodation. But it shouldn't be at the expense of tenants who already live here." - Jim Millard, Deputy Leader, Richmond Council
From a property management perspective, this situation highlights a fundamental tension that has been building for years. When housing benefit fails to keep pace with market rents, when social housing supply is not replenished, and when councils face mounting statutory obligations, the pressure has to go somewhere. Right now, it is going onto private renters, and often the most vulnerable people in the market.
What this means for London landlords and agents
The London Centric report is a reminder that the regulatory environment around lettings is changing rapidly, and the reputational stakes are rising with it. The Renters' Rights Act, which will ban no-fault section 21 evictions, is already reshaping expectations. But as this story shows, the abolition of section 21 alone will not resolve the deeper supply crisis driving these decisions.
For landlords, the pressure to sell vacant stock to councils at a premium will likely intensify. For agents, understanding how these dynamics affect the properties we manage - and the tenants within them - is becoming an essential part of the job. Blocks in outer London boroughs, in particular, are increasingly attractive to borough housing teams looking to procure off the open market.
The residents of Garden Court, some of whom have lived there for sixteen years, are a reminder that behind every transaction there are lives being uprooted. Good property management means keeping that reality in focus, even when the market makes it inconvenient to do so.
The bigger picture
London's boroughs are not acting maliciously. They face genuine, acute pressure to house vulnerable people under legal obligations with constrained budgets. But the approach being taken - buying up existing tenanted blocks, displacing residents into neighbouring boroughs, who then face similar displacement - is a cascade with no end point. It is, as Richmond's deputy leader describes it, a revolving door.
The answer lies upstream: in substantially more social housebuilding, in a housing benefit system that actually tracks rental inflation, and in planning reform that enables genuine new supply. Until then, London's housing crisis will continue to be managed in ways that simply redistribute its costs - onto tenants, onto outer boroughs, and ultimately onto the people least equipped to absorb them.
Photo by Aswin Mahesh on Unsplash
This post draws on original reporting by Polly Smythe for London Centric. We strongly recommend reading the full article for the personal testimonies of Garden Court residents and the detailed investigative detail behind this story. Read the original piece at londoncentric.media →
