Councils in London have spent more than £140million snapping up homes outside the city to relocate homeless people.
Local authorities in the capital have acquired more than 850 properties across England since 2017, with many in the most deprived areas of the east and southeast of the country, The Guardian reported.
Bizarrely, some London councils have already bought properties in the Midlands and are planning to send some people as far as Liverpool and the northeast.
Officials identified 704 people living on the streets of the capital between October and December last year – a 26 per cent rise on the previous year.
Meanwhile, a total of 4,612 individuals were found to be sleeping rough, a five per cent increase on the year before.
People are deemed to be living on the streets if they have had been seen rough sleeping on several occasions over a period of three weeks or more.
In order to deal with the scope of the problem, and faced with an extreme shortage of social housing and skyrocketing private rents, more than a dozen local authorities – and the housing companies they partially own – have invested heavily in property outside of London’s boundaries.
The non-London residences are used to house homeless individuals or families either as temporary emergency accommodation or permanently as a privately rented home.
Hellbound and Down 