Rough Sleeping: Families with Children

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Wednesday 11th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Local Government and Homelessness (Alison McGovern)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) for securing the debate. She has been dedicated to tackling homelessness for many years, including in her work as the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for ending homelessness. Rough sleeping and homelessness are issues that scarred our city region for many years, and I know that everybody at home is very proud of her and the work she does.

As many hon. Members from a number of parties have mentioned, we do not want to be here talking about this issue, but it is so serious that we must. Like all hon. Members, I was extremely concerned about recent reports of families with children sleeping rough. To be absolutely clear, because there ought to be no ambiguity, this should never, ever happen.

Let me say, for clarity, that a household with a child has a priority need for the purposes of the Housing Act 1996. That means that if a household with a child is homeless and is eligible for homelessness assistance, the household must be provided with temporary accommodation until suitable settled accommodation is secured. Where households do not meet the criteria for homelessness assistance, local authorities have a duty under the Children Act 1989 to safeguard and promote the welfare of children who are in need, including by providing them with accommodation where necessary. Let me say, for absolute clarity, that that applies irrespective of the child’s immigration status.

The law is absolutely clear that where a local authority believes that a household does not have a local connection to the district, it remains under a duty to accommodate until a referral to another district has been accepted. It is only when a referral has been accepted that the receiving authority must fulfil any duties to accommodate. There should never be any reason for families to be refused accommodation while there is a dispute about which authority owes that household a duty. There is no grey area here: families with children should never be left without accommodation.

[Jim Shannon]

That is very clear for everyone, and I thank the Minister for it. One example from Northern Ireland that I did not get a chance to mention in my speech was the case of a mother with two children who were sleeping rough in the square. The reason they could not get temporary accommodation was that the Northern Ireland Housing Executive had none at the time. However, because of its duty of care, which the Minister outlined, it made accommodation available in a local hotel until such time as temporary accommodation became available. Is that something that the Minister advocates?

[Alison McGovern]

I am not quite sure that I caught all the details of the case that the hon. Member raised, but if he sends me them I will happily respond to him. He will know that we do not want children to be in B&B accommodation. That is one of the main planks of our strategy, which I will come to later.

As has been mentioned, I wrote to local authority leaders and chief executives last month to remind them of their duties and to ask that they take personal responsibility for making sure that no child in their area is ever left to sleep on the street, in a car or in any other location not designed for living in. I am conscious of the case raised by the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed). I am sure that he has made every effort to sort that out with Kirklees, but if he has further problems, or Kirklees has specific issues that it wants to raise with me, I trust that he will write to me directly.

We must support councils to meet their obligations, and my Department has been in contact with the councils mentioned in the report to understand how this was able to happen and to ensure that it will not happen again. More broadly, hon. Members will be aware that we recently completed the local authority finance settlement for the next three years, reconnecting council funding with deprivation. That should aid the councils that are more likely to face these issues to deal with them.

The Government are providing more than £2.4 billion this spending review period in support of the Families First Partnership programme, which is introducing reforms to children’s social care. It will ensure children and families can access timely support so that they can get ahead of this problem, as many Members have suggested. Local authorities should use that ringfenced funding to meet their duties under the Children Act. It has been great to speak to many Members and their local authority leaders about how they will do that.

We are providing record levels of investment in homelessness and rough sleeping support, including more than £3.6 billion over the three years from 2026-27 to 2028-29. That is a funding boost of more than £1 billion compared with the previous Government’s commitment, and I pay tribute to the Chancellor for taking that decision. It is right that we are investing that much, because we inherited a homelessness crisis. Members have set out just how bad things have got.

Our long-term vision is to end homelessness and rough sleeping and ensure everyone has access to a safe and decent home. The statistics that we have heard today show that, for far too many people, that is not yet the case. We published our national plan to end homelessness last December to shift the system from crisis response to prevention and to get back on track to ending homelessness.

Our plan is backed by clear national targets to increase the proportion of households who are supported to stay in their own home or helped to find alternative accommodation when they approach their local council for support. That is the prevention goal, and it should underpin everything we do. For reasons that have been mentioned—not least the experience shared by my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher)—we must prevent first. Homelessness is too big of a trauma; nobody should experience it.

By the end of this Parliament, we want to eliminate the use of B&B accommodation for families, except in absolute, dire emergencies, and halve rough sleeping. Of course, we want everyone to have a roof over their head, but some of the problems that we are facing and the experiences of rough sleepers go deep, so we have to go to the toughest of problems.

Our plan is backed by £3.6 billion of funding, including £2.2 billion that councils are free to use to design effective, locally tailored services to deliver better outcomes and reduce reliance on emergency interventions. A number of Members asked about ringfencing. There is tension between allowing local innovation, for which ringfences are unhelpful, and putting clear ringfences around funds to ensure that all councils can tackle homelessness. It is a balance, and that is the way we have taken the decision about the funding.

Our plan sets out how we will tackle the root causes of homelessness by building 1.5 million new homes, including more social and affordable housing than has been built for years. We are also lifting 550,000 children out of poverty through the measures in our child poverty strategy, including by lifting the two-child limit.

Public institutions should lead the way in preventing homelessness. Our plan sets a long-term ambition that no one should leave a public institution into homelessness, and we have cross-Government targets to start that change and reduce homelessness from prisons, care and hospitals.

A number of Members, including the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes), were kind enough to say that they believed in my will to get this done but expressed scepticism about other Departments. I hope I can reassure them that they do not need to be sceptical. My experience of working with Ministers in other Departments has been positive.

Local Elections: Cancellation

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Monday 19th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

Elections will be happening up and down this country in May. We are committed to democracy and it is very important that people have their say.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Lady is indeed a very honourable lady, in her response and in the way that she does things in the House, but the fact is that, whether it be down to reorganisation or a new strategy—whatever reasons the Government put forward—3.7 million people will be denied the right to cast their vote. They will see it as a denial of their franchise, which will reduce their confidence in the Government, the Minister and local government. What will she and the Government do to restore that confidence, in the light of the denial of people’s franchise and their right to express themselves democratically?

[Alison McGovern]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the attention and care that he gives to these issues. He gives me the opportunity to come back to the underlying reason for this whole process, which is reorganisation to get councils in a good position. In those areas that are undergoing reorganisation, once we have got the new institutions set up, which we are doing without delay, people will be able to elect representatives to those new institutions. That is what happened when we had reorganisation previously—as has been mentioned, this process has been gone through recently—and it will mean that people can elect their councillors, and have their say about the kind of public services they want in their area.

Local Government Reorganisation

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Thursday 18th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I have heard it and take it away as part of our consideration of the issues around reorganisation. We published the criteria that we will use to take decisions with regards to reorganisation, and we need to stick to those criteria, but I take seriously the point that he raises.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the Minister for her update. Having gone through a local government restructure in Northern Ireland some years ago, I can say that the shifts are dynamic and that it can be very difficult to reconcile the new ways. What information will be available for the general public to ensure that the transition is understood and that people are not alienated from their local representation?

[Alison McGovern]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his commitment to taking part in these discussions and for the insights he brings from Northern Ireland. I will alert colleagues in local government to those and let them know that there is experience they could learn from.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question because, as the Prime Minister says, we are the party of the builders. As my hon. Friend says, the Labour party was created to serve the simple principle that working-class people could run the country. The Department for Education is working closely with colleges and with us in the Department for Work and Pensions to create construction foundation apprenticeships from this August, which will give many more young people the tools they need for a career in the trades. That is in addition to DWP support for employers, which we have recently expanded specifically with those trades he mentions in mind.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The rules and regulations that apply to employment, education or training in the Makerfield constituency should apply across this great United Kingdom. Many of those in the construction sector that the Minister referred to, whether they are builders, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers or electricians, come from my constituency of Strangford across to London, so it is important that people in my constituency and across Northern Ireland get the same opportunities through the colleges. Will the Minister ensure that discussions take place with Northern Ireland so that my constituency can continue to supply the people who build houses here in London?

[Alison McGovern]

I pay tribute to all those from the hon. Gentleman’s constituency who have been part of building our whole country. We work very closely with the devolved Administrations across the United Kingdom to ensure that, as the Secretary of State laid out, chances and opportunities are there for everybody. I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman as we move forward through our change programme.

Furniture Poverty

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Employment (Alison McGovern)]

As ever, Sir Roger, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) for securing this debate and for the very important work that he has done to support the Renters’ Rights Bill, which will make a big difference to the experience of people living in privately rented homes.

On behalf of us all, may I congratulate the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) on her new appointment? She is right to say that she and I have debated these issues many times. I will miss doing so, and I know that many of my colleagues in the DWP miss her. We wish her all the very best in her new role.

The current level of poverty is unacceptable: 1.3 million more people are in poverty than in 2010. Poverty damages lives in so many ways, as we have heard this afternoon. People simply cannot fulfil their potential when struggling to pay for basic essentials, or in many cases going without them. I am determined that we will take steps to put that right.

Good work will always be the foundation of our approach to tackling poverty. Hon. Members will know that we had a manifesto commitment to bring forward changes in this area. We will shortly publish the “Get Britain Working” White Paper, which will announce our reforms in that area. We will have a new service to support more people to enter, remain and do better in work, and a youth guarantee, with increased join-up of employment and health, which are causing so many challenges in this area. Through our plan to make work pay, we will ensure that we create opportunities for all by tackling low pay, poor working conditions and job security. This is a truly ambitious agenda to empower working people and grow our economy.

We want to protect living standards, and wages are important in doing that. The national wage introduced by the new Labour Government back in 1999 has had a transformative effect on the fortunes of working people. In last week’s Budget it was announced that the national living wage will rise to £12.21 an hour from next April, boosting the pay of 3 million workers. That is an increase of 6.7%, worth £1,400 a year for a full-time worker, helping us to make progress towards a genuine living wage.

Hon. Members have mentioned the child poverty taskforce. I will take today’s debate as a submission through the child poverty taskforce process, because we have shown how interconnected many of the issues are. It is shameful that in a rich country such as the UK, 4 million children were living in relative poverty last year, and that 800,000 children have used a food bank in the past 12 months. As has been said, the End Child Poverty campaign has suggested that 1.2 million children were in furniture poverty in 2022. That is just unacceptable. It scars children’s lives now and can damage their long-term health, education and employment outcomes. It holds our country back, and we are determined to see change.

I hope it is helpful to hon. Members if I give a brief update on the child poverty taskforce, which is working to publish a comprehensive and ambitious child poverty strategy in the spring. Last month, we published a framework to set out how we will develop the strategy, harnessing all available levers because, as so many Members have said, policy in one area affects another. We want to develop the strategy with exactly that in mind. We have four key themes: incomes, costs, increasing financial resilience and getting better local support. On that note, I recently visited Glasgow, where the city council is doing excellent work to join things up locally, as Members have suggested.

Later this month, the taskforce will meet employers, trade unions and think-tanks to discuss options to increase incomes and financial resilience in low-income households. We want to ensure that the strategy addresses poverty in every corner of the land and that we hear and learn from families in poverty as we shape it. We will be holding engagement events across the UK—I have already visited various constituencies myself—bringing together a diverse range of voices and setting up a new forum for parents and carers to ensure that the experiences of our kids are included at the heart of the strategy.

The Government believe that a wealthy country like the United Kingdom should have a social security system that meets the needs of people who are unable to fully support themselves through work. We know that for many, the system we inherited is not currently achieving that. We are determined to fix the fundamentals so that low-income families can afford the basics. We have inherited a number of policies and a challenging fiscal climate that have left us with difficult choices.

In response to the shadow Minister’s point about universal credit, it is fair to say that the policy has been on a long journey. Some of the points she made about the responsiveness of social security during the pandemic are important. We must learn from that and try to address the challenges we now face. That is why we have committed to reviewing universal credit and will listen to a full range of views on potential changes to make sure that it is doing its job now.

As a first step, the Chancellor announced in last week’s Budget that we will introduce a fair repayment rate. That will help households on universal credit who are having deductions made from their benefit, perhaps because they had a loan of some kind or moved into a new home and needed to buy furniture or other items. We will ensure that they can retain more of the money from their benefit to help them to budget for essentials like this. Over 1.2 million households on universal credit will benefit from the changing of the deduction cap from 25% to 15%. It will mean an average of £420 a year, which is a good down payment on a future plan.

I turn to the specific issue of furniture affordability. Most of us will experience large one-off costs or unexpected expenditure at some point. As hon. Members have explained fully, these costs can be difficult to budget for, and we do not want to drive people into debt.

[Jim Shannon]

I mentioned the significant work done by charities and particularly churches, including St Vincent de Paul. What are the Minister’s thoughts on that?

[Alison McGovern]

The hon. Gentleman makes his point very well. Let me respond briefly to questions that Members have raised. I will ask the relevant Minister to write to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire about the regulatory changes arising from the Renters’ Rights Bill, on whose Public Bill Committee he served ably. I reassure him that the DWP will work across Departments, because these areas cover different departmental responsibilities. We will include all those points in the child poverty taskforce. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is right about charities—Wirral Repair Café in my constituency does a fantastic job.

My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) made an excellent speech on household support fund guidance. I encourage him to be part of that conversation. I will take away what he has said, but he might want to write to me with more detail. To other hon. Members, I say that we are looking at all the ways in which poverty is now affecting people, given the spikes in energy prices and other issues. The comments were about the construction of homes and how we can limit the cost of energy are very important. I encourage Members to keep bringing those points forward, because now is the time to address them.

Hon. Members will know that the social security system has always made provision to help people on low incomes without adequate savings, and we do consider the impact of budgeting loans, advances and other measures. I mentioned the change in deductions. We know that while there will always be people who struggle to meet unexpected costs, no one wants a system in which large numbers of people are relying on crisis support to help them to feed their families or pay for heating and other day-to-day essentials. We want the system to genuinely respond to this as a crisis, not a chronic problem.

To support the upcoming child poverty strategy and address the demand we face, as the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield mentioned, we are continuing to provide substantial funding for crisis support through the household support fund and discretionary housing payments. We will invest £1 billion, including the Barnett impact, to extend the household support fund in England for an additional year until 31 March 2026 and to maintain the discretionary housing payments fund for a further year. This will ensure that the current targeted support is available for the most vulnerable.

In the end, we know that there is no quick fix. The issues that we have in this country are deep rooted and complicated, but that can never be an excuse for not trying to tackle them. We have taken the first steps, and there is more to come in the child poverty strategy and the “Get Britain Working” White Paper. I look forward to working with all Members here to get this right.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered furniture poverty.

Carer’s Allowance

Debate between Jim Shannon and Alison McGovern

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

I will come to the review that we will be conducting, but let me make the general point that we in the Government ought to be able to understand the realities of life and take that into account.

The position that I have described makes the dire situation we have inherited all the more shameful. Family carers are being pushed to breaking point. They have too often been forced to quit jobs that they want to keep and could keep with the right support, which isolates them and shrinks our workforce. With the right support, we could help carers and help our economy as well. To rub salt into the wound, we have inherited a system whereby busy carers, already struggling under a huge weight of responsibility, have been left having to repay large sums of overpaid carer’s allowance, sometimes amounting to thousands of pounds. It seems as though what is supposed to be a safety net designed to catch those in need was instead designed to catch them out.

[Jim Shannon]

For some time constituents of mine have found that they are due to repay an overpayment. I always ask them whether they remember when they made their complaint. All telephone conversations with the Department are recorded, so there is a way of making it clear that the fault lies not with the applicant but with the Department. Is there also a way of ensuring that those who have been penalised unfairly for following the Department’s advice should not have to pay that money?

[Alison McGovern]

As the hon. Member knows, the Department is not responsible for the delivery of social security benefits in Northern Ireland, but I am sure that Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities will be keeping a close eye on the debate and will want to take his points into account.

This problem is one of the numerous ways in which our social security system is failing the people of this country, with 2.8 million left out of work because they are unwell and more than 4 million children growing up poor, and we have therefore moved fast to fix the foundations of the DWP. That includes our setting up a taskforce to tackle child poverty, extending the household support fund for six months, and holding the first meeting of our new Labour Market Advisory Board. The board’s expertise and fresh thinking will help us break down barriers to work, such as an inability to balance paid work with family care.