A North East council has spent millions in the last year to prevent homelessness and provide temporary accommodation.

This comes as the region is gripped with rising homelessness in towns like Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.

Figures from an FOI by Personal Injury Claims UK show that Newcastle City Council spent £3.5m on temporary accommodation for 770 households in the last year.

In 2023, about 109,000 households in England – including 142,000 children – were in emergency housing between June and September - up 10 per cent on the same period the previous year.

In 2021/22, the number of people staying in temporary accommodation in Newcastle stood at 636, with a possible cause for this being the ongoing cost-of-living crisis forcing people to find other, cheaper places to live. A year later, this number increased to 682.

Over the past year, the city has experienced another rise in the number of temporary accommodation residents, with the number standing at 770.

A spokesperson from Newcastle City Council said: "Newcastle has a strong record of preventing homelessness. However, the combination of poverty, the rising cost of living, housing scarcity, increasing housing demand and limited supply presents a significant challenge for our housing system. 

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"Where people are homeless, we commission a range of options for accommodation with additional support to try and ensure that any experience of homelessness is rare, brief and nonrecurring. 

"We look to provide rapid rehousing to offer a route out of homelessness as quickly as possible, alongside appropriate support which helps people to resettle and sustain their independence in affordable, suitable and sustainable accommodation.

"As a housing provider, we are occasionally required to temporarily accommodate residents and try wherever possible to do so into commissioned properties rather than hotels. We want all of our residents to have a chance to live in a place that meets their needs and offer a range of outreach support services to assist with this."