Tom Burgess
BBC / BBC 4Tom Burgess is a reporter for BBC North East. He previously worked at The Northern Echo where he began investigating vulnerable homeless families being relocated up to County Durham from London. His investigation The families forced to move hundreds of miles for a home exposed how London councils struggling to deal with the homelessness crisis have been using private sector companies to house families away from the capital. He produced the Radio 4 podcast Someone Else’s Problem: Exporting the Housing Crisis which highlighted the lack of data around the number of families moved.
His shortlisted pieces were:
- The families forced to move hundreds of miles for a home
- Someone else’s problem: exporting the housing crisis
Tom’s pieces really joined some dots for us: he linked the geographical inequalities in the country with the failures in the asylum system, and helped to show how that leads to some of the problems of homelessness in parts of the country like County Durham.
– Sarah O’Connor, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2026
