Rough Sleeping

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab) [V]]

Official statistics estimate that 4,266 people were sleeping rough at the start of the pandemic, but the Government claim to have helped 33,000 rough sleepers into emergency accommodation. How does the Secretary of State square that circle, and will he commit to provide a richer and more frequent picture of homelessness and rough sleeping across the country to ensure that everyone’s basic human rights with regard to shelter can be met both as we come through the pandemic and in the longer term?

[Robert Jenrick]

The numbers that we publish today are a snapshot of a single night in November. Those are the most robust data sources that we have. They are the ones that we are able to measure ourselves on because they have been in place for more than 10 years now. I think that that is the right way forward.

The Everyone In programme did not help just those individuals who were actually sleeping rough on the streets. It also helped many people who were sofa surfing or in other forms of precarious accommodation who were at risk of ending up on the streets. So the success of the programme has been not just to get people off the streets but to help many thousands of other people who were otherwise in difficult circumstances to begin to move forward with their lives.