Homelessness

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

I want to whizz through an excellent partnership between YMCA Birmingham and the Government in providing accommodation for young, formerly homeless people. I spent an excellent three years of my working life working for YMCA Birmingham. It has been in existence since 1849, so it did not need my help to continue working—it had obviously been doing a grand job of work for a considerable amount of time. During those three years, and immediately before and immediately afterwards, the Government offered YMCA Birmingham tremendous support through what might seem to be a lexicon of the funding available. Indeed, YMCA Birmingham seems to have been particularly lucky. Alan Fraser, the chief executive who appointed me, is obviously a very wise man, and the organisation’s success is partly down to his brilliance.

When I joined the organisation, it had just been given £450,000 of empty homes money. The Government had provided £100 million through two separate rounds of funding to bring buildings that had been lying empty for a number of years back intro use as accommodation. I understand that thousands of properties across the country would benefit from such funding, if the Government were to initiate it again. We probably do not hear much about that because lots of those buildings are outside London—clearly our focus is largely only in London. Would it not be lovely if we could look north to the midlands and beyond, and share some of the money universally? We used the £450,000 to bring a former social care building back into use. We converted the building to create 33 units of fairly self-contained accommodation—just three of the properties shared kitchen facilities.

During my tenure we also received £1 million in affordable homes money to create the Chris Bryant centre and the Vineyard in Erdington, with 33 flats of mostly single-bed accommodation. Also on that site, although not funded by the Government, we had a training and conference facility and a café, because the YMCA is diversifying its offering into social entrepreneurship to raise money to help to subsidise the excellent housing it provides.

Perhaps most importantly for this debate, the YMCA was also granted money through the homelessness change and platform for life funds to modernise its 72-bed hostel in Northfield, which I am sure the Minister will be visiting with me very soon—it would be lovely if she would just smile and say yes.

The hostel’s facilities were euphemistically described as “study rooms”—10 square metre rooms that had space for only a bed and a table. Twenty of those rooms have now been converted to include en suite accommodation. Money has been provided for training facilities on the site, and for health visitors to visit previously homeless people on site. Their chaotic lifestyles sometimes mean it is difficult to persuade them to get to a GP, so why not bring the health visitors to them? Government funding has allowed that to happen, so let us not say that this Conservative Government do not support the homeless and the provision of services in all tenures across the UK.