Rough Sleeping

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the Rough Sleeping Statistics Autumn 2017, England, published on 25 January, which demonstrate the largest number of people sleeping on the streets of England since those statistics were first compiled in 2010.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, and in doing so I refer the House to my relevant registered interests as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are providing over £1 billion of funding to combat homelessness and rough sleeping, implementing the Homelessness Reduction Act and piloting a housing-first approach for rough sleepers with complex needs. We are committed to halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. To achieve this, we have established a task force to drive forward a cross-government strategy. It will be supported by a panel of experts, who met for the first time this morning.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, these are shocking figures, and come less than a month on from when I asked the noble Lord in this House about the number of families who were homeless over the Christmas period. Rather than our usual debates on these matters, could the noble Lord tell the House what discussions have taken place with ministerial colleagues in the department and whether other departments have been spoken to, as homelessness can be solved only with cross-departmental working and seeking to address the root causes and avoid the problems of working in silos? The tragedy of homelessness needs to be addressed, but actions in the noble Lord’s department have been undermined—for example, by housing benefit cuts delivered by the DWP.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right about the need to avoid silo thinking, which is why the homelessness task force, which will meet shortly, is a cross-government approach. He will appreciate that we announced that recently. As I say, the advisory committee is meeting for the first time this morning and includes representatives of Crisis and Shelter, such as Polly Neate, and mayors such as Andy Burnham and Andy Street. That, too, will be vitally important. This is a complex problem. The figures in the noble Lord’s own Borough of Lewisham, for example, have gone up 30% over the last period, according to the most recent statistics we have, but other boroughs are doing a good job, such as Cambridge, which is Labour-controlled, and Staffordshire, which is Conservative-controlled. So the housing-first approach that they are adopting is a very good one.