Thirty homeless Stockport households have been rehoused outside the borough, ten in Manchester. Cabinet is asked to make it permanent on 16 September.

Stockport Council has ended its legal duty to 30 homeless households by finding them private rented homes outside the borough. Ten went to Manchester and five to Tameside. One went to Aberdeen.

The council now wants that approach made permanent. A report published for last night’s Housing, Economy and Environment Scrutiny Committee asks the Cabinet (Housing) Committee to approve it on Wednesday 16 September (Stockport Council).

The reason is money. The council’s hotel bill for homeless households has gone from £150,000 four years ago to more than £2m.

Where the 30 households went

The out of borough scheme was approved in November 2024 and started in January 2025. It works by making a household a final offer of a private tenancy somewhere else. If the offer is refused, the council’s main housing duty ends.

Area Households
Manchester 10
Tameside 5
Bolton 2
Wigan 1
Cheshire East 1
Trafford 1
Newcastle-under-Lyme 1
Chorley 1
Salford 1
Pendle 1
Ealing 1
Bristol 1
Birmingham 1
Brentford 1
Liverpool 1
Aberdeen 1

The council says the households sent furthest “have done so by their own choice and have relocated voluntarily”. To find the properties, its move on officer visited 37 estate agents across Macclesfield, Buxton, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Whaley Bridge, Levenshulme, Bolton, Denton, Hyde, Manchester and Winsford (Stockport Council).

Some households are meant to stay. Priority for remaining in Stockport goes to those with support needs, a medical reason to stay, or a child accessing special educational needs provision, social care or other specialist support.

The hotel bill that drove it

Stockport Council spending on bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless households Column chart of Stockport Council's bed and breakfast accommodation costs across four financial years. 2022/23 was £150,000. 2023/24 was £624,000. 2024/25 was £1,141,144. 2025/26 was more than £2,000,000. Stockport's bed and breakfast bill has risen more than thirteenfold in four years Cost of hotel and B&B accommodation for homeless households, by financial year £150,000 2022/23 £624,000 2023/24 £1,141,144 2024/25 more than £2m 2025/26 Source: Homelessness and Housing Need report, Stockport Council, 3 September 2026. Bar heights are drawn to the figures above. Graphic by Stockport Today
The council owns about 140 units of temporary accommodation. Before 2022 it had never regularly needed hotels.

Stockport has three dedicated temporary accommodation schemes, plus off site flats, giving about 140 units in total. Until 2022 that was enough, and the service had never regularly resorted to bed and breakfast. Since then hotels have been in constant use, and the cost has climbed every year: £150,000 in 2022/23, £624,000 in 2023/24, £1,141,144 in 2024/25 and more than £2m in 2025/26.

From 2026/27 the council will start asking working households in temporary accommodation to contribute towards the cost.

The squeeze behind the numbers

Four separate pressures show up in the report, and they point the same way.

  • The housing register has grown by half in two years. There were 9,518 households on it in April 2026, against 6,356 in April 2024. Overcrowding has overtaken medical need as the most common reason for applying.
  • Social lettings keep falling. The council and Stockport Homes let 769 properties in 2021/22 and 529 in 2025/26. Right to buy sales hit 103 in 2025/26, a spike caused by applications rushed in before the November 2024 discount cut.
  • The private rented sector is shrinking. Properties coming up to let in the borough fell from about 600 at an August 2019 peak to just over 200 in March 2026, a drop of almost 66%. Of the 24 landlords who left Stockport Homes’ 360 Living service in 2025/26, 17 went specifically to sell.
  • Nothing is affordable on benefits. The local housing allowance for a three bedroom home rose to £899 a month in April 2024. A May 2026 check of Rightmove found no property in the borough within the allowance at all, with the cheapest three bedroom home at £277 a week, £70 above the rate.

The council’s assessed need for affordable homes has more than doubled, from 549 a year in its 2019 assessment to 1,305 a year in the 2025 one. It delivered 278 affordable homes in 2025/26, its best year of the last five, with a further 200 on site.

Stockport’s average house price reached £318,163 in July 2026 on HM Land Registry figures, the second highest in Greater Manchester after Trafford and about nine times median local income. Our Stockport house prices page tracks that figure each month.

Rough sleeping is at its highest recorded level

The Autumn 2025/26 annual snapshot counted 48 people sleeping rough in Stockport. That is the highest figure ever recorded here, a 55% rise on the previous year, and the second highest of the ten Greater Manchester boroughs.

The report attributes the rise to people assessed as not being in priority need who cannot get temporary accommodation, because demand from priority households has taken it. Stockport’s A Bed Every Night provision currently runs to 13 bed spaces.

Prevention still works better here than elsewhere. In 2025/26, 59% of homelessness prevention cases in Stockport ended successfully, against around 50% nationally and across Greater Manchester. A dedicated domestic abuse case officer supported 90 households during the year.

What the council admits about the cost

The out of borough scheme is not, on today’s figures, cheaper. The review says plainly that “the average cost of out-of-borough private rented sector (PRS) placements currently exceeds that of hotel accommodation”.

The incentives paid to landlords averaged £2,776 for each of the nine single households and £3,789 for each of the 21 families. Households repay a share, currently averaging £10 a month. The council’s case is that a 12 month tenancy is a better outcome than a hotel room with no kitchen, and that costs fall as hotel stays shorten.

Three households have challenged their offers through a statutory section 202 review. All three reviews were upheld. One turned on medical evidence submitted after the offer was made. The other found there was no evidence that options inside Stockport had been exhausted before the household was sent elsewhere. The council says it has changed its procedures as a result.

One officer is currently responsible for finding private tenancies for more than 200 households. A second post, externally funded for two years, is being added in 2026 to work with families in hotels.

What it means for you

  • If you approach the council as homeless and are not in the top priority band, a final offer of a private tenancy outside Stockport is now a realistic outcome, and refusing it can end the council’s duty to you.
  • Grounds for staying in the borough are narrow: support needs, a medical requirement, or a child’s special educational needs, social care or specialist provision.
  • You can ask for a section 202 review of a suitability decision. All three requested so far in Stockport have been upheld.
  • If you are already in temporary accommodation and working, expect to be asked for a contribution towards the cost during 2026/27.
  • Landlords with property to let can contact the council’s move on team, which is offering incentive payments averaging between £2,776 and £3,789.

What happens next

The Cabinet (Housing) Committee meets on Wednesday 16 September and is recommended to approve both the review and the policy that formalises out of borough placements and discharge into the private rented sector. A full review of the council’s homelessness service is running alongside it.

New housing supply is the other half of the answer, and it is decided site by site. Our Stockport planning news page follows the applications as they come.

Sources