I grew up in Newham. I went to primary school in Manor Park, secondary school in Forest Gate. As an adult, I lived in Beckton , until I couldn’t afford to anymore, and left for Kent.
I am, in other words, exactly the kind of person this borough is losing.
There is a street in Plaistow where sewage once pooled outside a rental property. The landlord was fined. Another street in the same borough where several families are living in overcrowded environments whilst others cope with damp and health inflicting mould . Others have been on the housing register for numerous years. A few miles away, in a council chamber in Stratford, politicians argue about who is to blame.
Welcome to uk/local/newham/">Newham in 2026 , one of the most diverse, most celebrated, and most housing distressed boroughs in Britain.
I now teach documentary and journalism at the University of East London. My students are from Newham, Tower Hamlets, Barking and Dagenham. Many commute past the very estates their families have been threatened with eviction from, and when I ask them what story they most want to tell, the answer is almost always some version of the same thing, why is home so hard to keep?
It is a question that cuts across race, class, and immigration status in ways that mainstream media rarely captures honestly. I know, because I lived that question before I ever learned to report on it.
The Numbers are Staggering
Newham Council is, by its own admission, in crisis. Over 7,300 families are currently in temporary accommodation a figure that has risen by more than 170% since 2013, growing by roughly 50 households every month. The cost of that temporary housing has nearly doubled in two years, from around £55 per night in 2023 to nearly £85 by March 2025. Last year alone, the council spent almost £70 million , not to solve the problem, but simply to contain it.
That £70 million came at a price. Newham’s projected budget gap reached £157 million, with the housing crisis accounting for the lion’s share. The council narrowly avoided bankruptcy, passing a crisis budget that included a 10% rise in council tax. Extraordinary financial support had to be requested from central government. Yet behind every statistic is a human being who had a home and then didn’t.
Eviction, not Immigration, is the Engine of this Crisis
Here is what often gets lost in the noise, the primary driver of homelessness in Newham is not immigration. It is private landlords evicting tenants. The council’s own reports confirm this. Section 21 no fault evictions now technically abolished under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, with full enforcement beginning May 2026 have displaced thousands. The private rental sector, largely unregulated for too long, became a machine for extracting maximum rent from the borough’s most vulnerable residents.
When I lived in Beckton, I watched this happen in real time. Neighbours who had been there for years, suddenly served notice. Rents that climbed faster than any pay rise could follow. The quiet, undramatic displacement of working people who simply could not keep up. Unlike many others , I had advantages that many of my former neighbours did not.
Newham’s private renters are disproportionately Black, Asian, Eastern European and immigrant families , people already locked out of homeownership by a market that moved faster than their wages, and locked out of social housing by waiting lists that stretch a decade long. This is the intersection that rarely makes the front pages the racialised nature of housing uncertainty in East London.
What Immigration Actually looks like here
Newham has one of the highest rates of international migration of any London borough. Families arrive from Nigeria, Bangladesh, Somalia, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and they settle, often in the private rented sector, often in overcrowded homes, often in properties that fail basic safety standards.
I have heard their stories. A mother from Sierra Leone sharing a two bedroom flat with three other families, each paying rent to a landlord who pocketed the money and disappeared. A young man from Ghana, newly arrived, sleeping in a converted garage because that was what £800 a month could buy him in East Ham.
These are not people gaming a system, they are people surviving one.
And yet the political discourse around immigration and housing too often uses their presence to explain a crisis that long predates them , a crisis rooted in decades of under investment in social housing, the right to buy policy that gutted council stock, and a private rental market left to self regulate.
What needs to change?
Newham Council has committed to a ten year housing plan. It has backed the Labour government’s broader house building agenda. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, now law, promises new protections. But laws are only as good as their enforcement, and enforcement requires resources that perpetually cash strapped councils often don’t have.
What East London needs is not more policy announcements. It needs what good journalism has always provided the patient, unglamorous work of sitting with people in their difficult circumstances and telling the truth about what and who put them there.
The children I went to school with in Manor Park and Forest Gate deserved to stay. So did my neighbours in Beckton. So do the 7,300 families in temporary accommodation.
The question is whether the rest of Britain is ready to listen.
