Brighton Rough Sleeping Funding: £1.35m Before Christmas

Brighton & Hove City Council has been allocated £1,350,803 this year to move people off the city’s streets, the largest share of any council in the South East. The money is the city’s first-year slice of a new £442 million national programme published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on 19 August. Over three years the city is down for £4,742,742.

The deadline attached to it is unusually blunt. The government’s guidance states: “The immediate priority is to move as many people as possible off the street and into accommodation before Christmas this year (2026).”

What Brighton has been given

The allocations are set out in the department’s own funding spreadsheet, published alongside the guidance. For Brighton & Hove:

• 2026-27: £1,350,803, all of it revenue funding for accommodation and support
• 2027-28: £714,483 revenue and £893,896 capital
• 2028-29: £707,103 revenue and £1,076,457 capital
• Three-year total: £4,742,742

Only the first line is firm. The spreadsheet carries its own footnote that “allocations for 2027-28 and 2028-29 are provisional only”, and the capital money for settled homes depends on the council confirming it can deliver and submitting a plan to the department. So the number to hold the council to this winter is £1,350,803, not £4.7m.

Revenue pays for running costs: beds, case workers, outreach. Capital buys and refurbishes buildings.

Where that puts the city

Of the 187 councils funded directly by the department this year, only Liverpool gets more than Brighton & Hove. Liverpool is on £1,607,961.

That comparison needs a caveat, and it is one the summaries have skipped. The spreadsheet has a second tab showing what every English council was assessed for, including the London boroughs and big city councils whose money is routed through a mayoral authority rather than paid to them directly. On that fuller list of 296 councils, Brighton & Hove ranks 19th for 2026-27. Westminster tops it on £7,574,378.

Against its own region the city stands well clear. These are the biggest 2026-27 allocations in the South East:

Over the full three years Reading and Milton Keynes both edge ahead of Brighton, because more of their award is back-loaded capital. On the money available this winter, Brighton & Hove is first in the region by £417,351.

Closer to home the gaps are wide. Eastbourne gets £396,820 this year, Hastings £387,949, Crawley £342,437, Worthing £337,118, Arun £274,182, Lewes £151,497 and Adur £72,623.

Why Brighton scores so highly

The department says the 2026-27 allocations were “determined using the Single Homelessness and Rough Sleeping formula, with a minimum allocation for local authorities with at least 2 people based on 12 month average rough sleeping data”.

That last phrase matters locally, because the number most people know is the annual one-night snapshot, and on that measure Brighton is not the region’s worst. On a single night in autumn 2025 the count in Brighton & Hove was 57 people, down from 76 the year before, according to the rough sleeping snapshot published on 26 February. That was still the 10th highest total of 296 English councils, and a rate of 20.1 people per 100,000 residents against 8.2 for England as a whole. Several Sussex and Kent neighbours had higher rates: Hastings 40.6, Eastbourne 27.8, Thanet 25.9 and Crawley 25.8.

The formula runs on a twelve-month average rather than a single autumn night, which is why a city with a large and persistent street population lands near the top of the table even in a year when its snapshot fell.

This is on top of the main grant, not instead of it

The programme is additional money. Brighton & Hove was already allocated £11,265,302 for 2026-27 under the Homelessness, Rough Sleeping and Domestic Abuse Grant, the consolidated grant announced on 8 May that swallowed the old Homelessness Prevention Grant, the Rough Sleeping Prevention and Recovery Grant and the domestic abuse safe accommodation funding.

The new money comes with conditions. It is ringfenced, unspent amounts can be clawed back, and the guidance says it must be additional to what a council already provides rather than a replacement for it. It cannot be spent on general temporary accommodation. Homes bought with the capital element must be let at social rent levels and held on leases of at least ten years.

The programme has two strands. “Routes off the street” is the 2026-27 work: interim accommodation, named support workers, and access to mental health, drug and alcohol services without requiring someone to be verified as rough sleeping first. The second strand is settled housing with support, and the government says the first new homes will be delivered from 2027-28.

Grant determination letters and payment conditions are due in October, and allocations depend on councils submitting delivery plans to the department. So the money is not in the council’s bank account yet.

What it means for you

If you see someone sleeping rough in Brighton or Hove, the referral route is StreetLink, which passes the location to the local outreach team. The council sets out its own services on its page on how it helps people living on the streets, and its homelessness and rough sleeping strategy for 2025 to 2030 is the document this funding is meant to accelerate.

Two things are worth watching over the autumn. The first is the delivery plan the council has to send the department before it is paid, which will say what the £1.35m actually buys and how many bed spaces it opens. The second is whether any of it is visible before Christmas, because that is the test the government has publicly set for it.

We have also covered the city’s record temporary accommodation numbers and the council’s own housing stock work.