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Winter Homelessness Support

It is a pleasure to join this debate with you in the Chair, Mrs Miller. As co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness, I wholeheartedly congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) on securing this debate.

A year ago, the Government were elected with a manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping in this Parliament. That is a welcome and ambitious agenda. This year, they could go some way to meeting that target through Everyone In, which is estimated to have helped 30,000 people.

We should put on the record our gratitude to charities such as St Mungo’s, which operates in Southwark, and councils such as the London borough of Southwark for all the support they have given in this difficult period. Southwark has helped 799 people, and at one point was providing help to more than one third of all those accommodated in the entire capital city.

That 30,000 figure follows the Government claim in January that there were only 5,000 rough sleepers in the country. My first question to the Minister is: when will the Government implement a new, robust measurement, rather than that finger-in-the-air approach? During Everyone In, Combined Homelessness and Information Network stats showed that there were still 3,500 people sleeping on the streets from July, so has the Minister done an assessment of why that was happening that can be shared with the House?

One of the reasons that has been identified today is no recourse to public funds. The Government simply are not funding everyone. Ten per cent. of those helped in the London borough of Southwark had no recourse to public funds. Is that figure the same nationally, Minister? Will the Government fix the misnomer of Everyone In and actually fund everyone? Will the Minister acknowledge that it is cheaper to cancel the no recourse to public funds restrictions than to require councils, using public money, to spend more on emergency accommodation?

We should recognise that Everyone In has saved lives. One study published in The Lancet suggested that 266 deaths, more than 21,000 infections and more than 1,000 hospital admissions had been avoided, so it has saved lives and saved the NHS from being overwhelmed. That safety-first approach needs to continue.

Southwark is using the Robes Project—a fantastic organisation—to provide self-contained rooms this winter, because communal shelters cannot operate due to the risk of covid. Will the Government also commit to funding safe accommodation for everyone this winter? I ask that because their cold weather fund, which has

already been announced, is £3 million lower this year than it was last year, despite the covid risks, the higher costs and the growing risk of not just becoming homeless but being homeless.

We have just heard about the ONS figures, which were published on Monday, that show that there is a greater risk of dying on our streets. It was 778 last year—up 7% on the previous year. An extra person every week dies on our streets. That is the highest ever figure. It rose last year and is very likely to jump again in 2021 if the Government do not act now. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister what specific measures are being adopted to tackle the problem of people dying on our streets.

That is a legitimate question. Look at the situation we face: not just covid, but the rise in unemployment, the return of evictions and the continued lack of support for people facing hostile environment policies. To put some numbers on that, nearly 67,000 people approached English local authorities for homelessness assistance between April and June this year. That figure is likely to rise further in the next statistics. The Government need to recognise the scale of the problem, and fully resource councils to respond to and manage the volume they are seeing. A failure to act will mean not just a missed manifesto target, but that councils and charities are overwhelmed, that covid infections will rise, and that there will be more deaths on our streets. That will be the brutal reality if the Government fail to act.

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