Homeless People and Rough Sleeping

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The annual snapshot that we take in autumn is our official and most robust measure of rough sleeping on a single night. It is independently verified. I do not have the numbers for those who are out for a second night. But we know that the longer a person stays on the street, the more difficult it becomes to rebuild a life off it. As set out in the cross-government rough sleeping strategy, Ending Rough Sleeping for Good, we will have ended rough sleeping when it is prevented wherever possible and, where it does occur, is rare, brief and non-recurrent. We do have the No Second Night Out initiative, which pays for 14,000 beds and 3,000 support staff this year, with services ranging from emergency interventions to focus on preventions and a more sustained off-the-street accommodation offer with support.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, this remains a real issue, and the Minister, I am afraid, is being rather complacent. We know that what has happened since 2010 is that there have been unprecedented levels of rough sleeping. We managed, in the early part of the 1997 Government, to reduce rough sleeping almost to nonexistence. We know how to do it. The Government know how to do it, but it is not happening. We now have the additional crisis that so many of the charities that are there to help those who are in most difficulty are going under, and their finances are stretched. The Government have got to do something—just what are they going to do?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

We are absolutely not complacent, as I said in my initial Answer. In fact, between October and December, when the snapshot was taken, our management accounts show that homelessness reduced by 27%—although I acknowledge that that is partly as a result of seasonal variations, which happen every year. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2018 was the most ambitious reform to homelessness legislation in decades. Since it came into force in 2018, over half a million households have been prevented from becoming homeless or have been supported into settled accommodation. As a demonstration of our determination not to be complacent, we have put £2 billion into the fund to help reduce homelessness. The noble Baroness is entirely wrong to use 2010 as a comparator, because that is when the statistics were started on this basis. She might like to know that we are almost up to the level of highest number of households in temporary accommodation, which was in 2004.