(3 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberI am obliged to my right hon. Friend for the concern that she evinces in respect of this matter. I am happy to update her. The Government are providing a £10 million cold weather fund to all local authorities, to help them to bring forward self-contained accommodation this winter. Our new £15 million protect programme is providing dedicated funding to local areas with the highest numbers of rough sleepers. Alongside that there is a £2 million transformation fund to help faith and community centres to move away from night shelters and into more innovative and positive options for shelter guests. I was pleased that my right hon. Friend directed me towards our noble Friend Lord Bird; I am happy to continue to engage with him and her, as is the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst).
(3 years, 7 months ago)
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As I have already described, we have disbursed £180 million in discretionary housing payments to local authorities to support them in supporting those in difficulty. We have spent several billion pounds on supporting local authorities through this pandemic, and we will keep our proposals under review, to ensure that we help everybody who is affected by this crisis, including the hon. Lady’s constituents in York. The measures put in place by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer—described by the shadow Chancellor as a “lifeline”—and by the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), which to date have injected a further £9.3 billion into our welfare safety net, are designed to do exactly what we want to do: keep people off the street, keep them in their homes and keep them in their jobs as we move through this crisis.
The Government took really excellent, strong steps to get rough sleepers off the streets during the first wave of the pandemic. My right hon. Friend might recall that, together with the noble Lord Bird from the other place—the founder of The Big Issue—I wrote to the Government with some suggestions on how we could continue to ensure that rough sleeping becomes a thing of the past. Now, of course, with the end of the moratorium on evictions fast approaching, the risk of people losing their work and then their home is increasing, so will my right hon. Friend agree to look at some of the excellent and practical proposals of the Ride Out Recession Alliance, started by the founders of The Big Issue, and consider taking some of them up to prevent joblessness becoming homelessness yet again?
I have already described the package of measures that we have introduced: we have extended to six months the notice period that landlords are required to give their tenants, which means that tenants will not have to leave their homes over Christmas, and we have made it clear that over the Christmas period and in areas of lockdown there will be no evictions—between 11 December and 11 January there will be no evictions. I think, therefore, that we have taken some steps that my right hon. Friend has described. I am always prepared to look at ideas, particularly if they are supplied by my right hon. Friend.