The Spending Review 2025 set MHCLG’s departmental budgets until 2028-29 for resource spending and 2029-30 for capital investment. No additional funding has been allocated to MHCLG beyond that settlement for this announcement. We have already provided record levels of funding to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping. The £340 million is from within existing MHCLG budgets that had not yet been committed to specific spending plans. This means that the announcement does not require the reprofiling or reprioritisation of programmes already underway. The profile of the £340 million will be finalised in due course.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions reviewed Local Housing Allowance at the 2025 Autumn Budget and announced that rates would be maintained at their current levels for 2026/27. A range of factors, such as rent levels across the country and poverty impacts, were considered against the fiscal context and the level of housing support that Government provides overall.

The causes of homelessness are multi-faceted and often complex. The Department for Work and Pensions continues to work closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to make sure interactions with homelessness are considered.

Renters receiving housing support who face a shortfall in meeting their rent costs can apply for a Crisis and Resilience Fund Housing Payment from local authorities in England.

Homelessness is a devolved issue, and the government set out our plans to tackle homelessness in England through the National Plan to End Homelessness in December 2025, which you can find on gov.uk here.

Our Plan sets out a credible plan to get back on track to ending homelessness, including medium-term change to support local authorities and public services to shift from crisis to prevention through cross government targets, £3.6 billion funding for homelessness and rough sleeping services over the next 3 years and new duties on services to work together to prevent homelessness.

In the short-term, we are taking action to tackle the worst forms of temporary accommodation and supporting local authorities to develop better alternatives by ending the unlawful use of B&Bs for families and continuing to work with local authorities with the highest use of B&B accommodation over the next through years through an expanded Emergency Accommodation Reduction Programme backed by £30 million funding.

We will also halve long-term rough sleeping by the end of this parliament, including through £159 million new funding for supported housing, £37 million for voluntary, community and faith organisations, and £15 million for councils to test new approaches.

Ill health can be both a cause and consequence of homelessness; the health and wellbeing of people who experience homelessness are poorer than the general population and people who have experienced rough sleeping die decades sooner than those who have not. We recognise the importance of understanding how housing insecurity can affect health outcomes and access to care and are working to tackle these and all other health inequalities including through our 10-Year Health Plan.

No one eligible for homelessness assistance should be discharged to the street after a hospital stay, as outlined in the Government's National Plan to End Homelessness and our published guidance, Discharging people at risk of or experiencing homelessness. To help make this happen, every acute hospital has access to a multidisciplinary care transfer hub to manage the discharge of people with more complex needs. These teams work together to plan a person’s discharge, so their health and care needs as well as housing situation are all considered, and the right support is in place when they leave hospital. We are also working with councils and integrated care boards (ICBs) to improve how existing funding streams can be used to fund intermediate care services tailored for those experiencing homelessness, to improve continuity of care and access to post-discharge rehabilitation, recovery and reablement. We are working very closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in this area.

Public bodies specified under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 including hospitals, emergency departments and social services have a duty to refer service users who they think may be homeless or threatened with homelessness to local authority homelessness/housing options teams. To build on this, the Government is committing to a new Duty to Collaborate which will strengthen and improve co-operation, early identification and information sharing between health, housing, and social care services.

NHS England recommends consideration of specialist intermediate care pathways for those at risk of or experiencing homelessness; this is set out in the guidance, Intermediate care framework for rehabilitation, reablement and recovery following hospital discharge.

The Government has not made a formal assessment of the extent to which homelessness affects access to elective and planned medical procedures. We are seeking to improve data collection in this area, however. As part of the Government’s plan, Reforming Elective Care for Patients, NHS England's plan to reform elective services, ICBs and National Health Service providers is expected to improve the completeness and accuracy of coding and recording practices, including housing status coding, through the use of relevant SNOMED codes, a standardised clinical coding system used in health records. NHS England's Statement on information on health inequalities also reiterates the expectation that ICBs, trusts and foundation trusts should consider how recording housing status can support the upstream identification of health inequalities, in line with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guideline on integrated health and care for people experiencing homelessness.

Ill health can be both a cause and consequence of homelessness; the health and wellbeing of people who experience homelessness are poorer than the general population and people who have experienced rough sleeping die decades sooner than those who have not. We recognise the importance of understanding how housing insecurity can affect health outcomes and access to care and are working to tackle these and all other health inequalities including through our 10-Year Health Plan.

No one eligible for homelessness assistance should be discharged to the street after a hospital stay, as outlined in the Government's National Plan to End Homelessness and our published guidance, Discharging people at risk of or experiencing homelessness. To help make this happen, every acute hospital has access to a multidisciplinary care transfer hub to manage the discharge of people with more complex needs. These teams work together to plan a person’s discharge, so their health and care needs as well as housing situation are all considered, and the right support is in place when they leave hospital. We are also working with councils and integrated care boards (ICBs) to improve how existing funding streams can be used to fund intermediate care services tailored for those experiencing homelessness, to improve continuity of care and access to post-discharge rehabilitation, recovery and reablement. We are working very closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in this area.

Public bodies specified under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 including hospitals, emergency departments and social services have a duty to refer service users who they think may be homeless or threatened with homelessness to local authority homelessness/housing options teams. To build on this, the Government is committing to a new Duty to Collaborate which will strengthen and improve co-operation, early identification and information sharing between health, housing, and social care services.

NHS England recommends consideration of specialist intermediate care pathways for those at risk of or experiencing homelessness; this is set out in the guidance, Intermediate care framework for rehabilitation, reablement and recovery following hospital discharge.

The Government has not made a formal assessment of the extent to which homelessness affects access to elective and planned medical procedures. We are seeking to improve data collection in this area, however. As part of the Government’s plan, Reforming Elective Care for Patients, NHS England's plan to reform elective services, ICBs and National Health Service providers is expected to improve the completeness and accuracy of coding and recording practices, including housing status coding, through the use of relevant SNOMED codes, a standardised clinical coding system used in health records. NHS England's Statement on information on health inequalities also reiterates the expectation that ICBs, trusts and foundation trusts should consider how recording housing status can support the upstream identification of health inequalities, in line with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guideline on integrated health and care for people experiencing homelessness.

The causes of homelessness are multi-faceted and often complex and they interact dynamically DWP continues to work closely with MHCLG on interactions with homelessness.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions reviewed Local Housing Allowance (LHA) at the 2025 Autumn Budget and announced that rates would be maintained at their current levels for 2026/27. A range of factors, such as rent levels across the country, were considered against the fiscal context, including the level of housing support that Government provides overall.

Renters receiving housing support who face a shortfall in meeting their rent costs can apply for discretionary support from local authorities via the Crisis and Resilience Fund Housing Payments in England and Discretionary Housing Payments in Wales.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions reviewed Local Housing Allowance (LHA) at the 2025 Autumn Budget and announced that rates would be maintained at their current levels for 2026/27. A range of factors, such as rent levels across the country and poverty impacts, were considered against the fiscal context, including the level of housing support that Government provides overall.

LHA rates are reviewed annually and future decisions on LHA will be taken in the context of the Government’s welfare priorities, and the fiscal context.

Renters receiving housing support who face a shortfall in meeting their rent costs can apply for the Crisis and Resilience Fund Housing Payment from local authorities in England.

The causes of homelessness are multi-faceted and often complex; they interact dynamically making it difficult to isolate the relative importance of individual factors. DWP continues to work closely with MHCLG on interactions with homelessness.

To support local authorities, we have introduced significant reforms to how we deliver funding to local authorities, to provide multi-year certainty and greater flexibility for them to be able to tailor services to meet local needs.

The government is providing £3.6 billion funding for homelessness services from 2026/27 to 2028/29, including just over £2.2 billion for local authorities to prevent and address homelessness and rough sleeping through the Homelessness, Rough Sleeping and Domestic Abuse Grant. £969m of Temporary accommodation funding, previously part of the Homelessness Prevention Grant is distributed using the new Fair Funding Assessment which, with a new built-in formula now also reflects proportional need for temporary accommodation across the country. You can find out more about how allocations were made here.

In addition to the ringfenced Homelessness and Rough Sleeping and Domestic Abuse Grant, local authorities are able to draw from their wider funding in the Local Government Finance Settlement to support deliver homelessness and rough sleeping outcomes.

You can find local authority level allocations on gov.uk here.

The government recognises that targeted support within schools can play a major role in identifying young people at higher risk of homelessness and providing support to them and their families at a much earlier stage. We continue to engage with Centrepoint on their Upstream pilots as part of our work to prevent youth homelessness.

Earlier data sharing aims to prevent homelessness in the first place. Providing local authorities with information on newly recognised refugees enables them to intervene at the earliest opportunity during the 42-day move-on period. This gives councils and individuals more time to explore appropriate housing options, including in the private rented sector, before an individual becomes homeless.

These measures do not change local authorities’ statutory homelessness duties or individuals’ entitlement to assistance.