More and more people are starting to notice rising levels of homelessness, as they see rough sleepers on the streets of towns and cities across the country. The reality is that these visible signs of homelessness are just the tip of the iceberg. The new report from the independent National Audit Office (NAO) finds that there are now approximately 4,100 people sleeping rough each year, with 120,000 children living in temporary accommodation.
The scale of the problem now extends to sections of society that go far beyond what people might imagine. On a recent visit to a Crisis centre, I heard about a women who completed her tax return on a laptop from her sleeping bag outside a train station.
Perhaps the most troubling conclusion from the NAO’s report is that the government doesn’t appear to be interested in solving this growing problem. Incredibly, the department with responsibility for preventing homelessness has not yet produced a plan for preventing homelessness.
Welfare reform, including the freeze on housing benefits, is one of the main drivers of homelessness, but the government hasn’t bothered to measure its effect. I fear that ministers know what the answers will be, and so don’t want to ask the questions.
When I was 17 and had nowhere to live, the first thing the housing charity I visited did was to show me how to apply for housing benefit. That option would not be open to me today, thanks to changes introduced earlier this year. Labour would reverse this decision and allow 18-21 year olds access to housing benefit, helping to prevent those who can’t live with their families from becoming homeless.
The main trigger of a household having to move into temporary accommodation is the end of a private rented tenancy. While the Conservatives pledged in their 2017 manifesto to encourage longer-term tenancies in order to provide more security to renting households, nothing was announced in the Queen’s speech. With a two-year parliamentary session, it’s now unlikely that we will see any action on this until at least 2020.
The government will point out that it passed the Homelessness Reduction Act earlier this year, which will give councils more responsibility to prevent homelessness and £61m of funding. But today’s National Audit Office report slams central government’s “light-touch” approach to working with local authorities. For example, while requiring councils to develop a homelessness strategy, the government neither checks the content of each strategy nor measures its progress, so it’s not clear what the point of this process is.
Unlike the current government, Labour will publish a plan to eradicate rough sleeping and follow through on it. We will protect those renting privately with secure tenancies and predictable rent rises; protect funding for supported and sheltered housing and homelessness hostels which the government plan to cut; and undertake a review of support for housing costs through the social security system.
The reality is that we are never going to solve this issue without building enough homes to house everyone. Under the Conservatives, affordable house building has hit a 24-year low. Labour’s plans would produce the thousands of genuinely affordable homes needed to tackle the root cause of rising homelessness.
Britain is too rich and too decent a nation to put up with seeing our neighbours, our children and our veterans go without a home. Labour demonstrated, when we were last in government, that homelessness is not an inevitable part of modern life, but a political choice on the part of government.
We reduced rough sleeping by three-quarters and oversaw an unprecedented decline in statutory homelessness. We will do the same again.
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