Rough Sleeping

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) on bringing this very important debate to the Chamber. I also congratulate the hon. Members on both sides who have raised important examples of homelessness and the real individual tragedies that people are facing.

As Liberals—both as the Liberal party and as the Liberal Democrats—we have always prized freedom from poverty as our constitutional objective, so it is not surprising that the first piece of homelessness legislation, the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, was pioneered by a Liberal MP, Stephen Ross. Before that, great Liberal legislation introduced the concept of council housing, which led to half a million council houses being built in the ensuing years. Today, though, that duty to homeless people has been weakened and watered down time and again, and we see the heartbreaking results on our streets all too often.

The Conservative Government promised to end street homelessness by 2024, yet we see rising numbers of people sleeping rough. Over 16,000 single households were assessed as sleeping rough in 2023-24, which is almost a 15% increase over the previous year. The crisis is not just about rough sleeping; there are now over 117,000 households in temporary accommodation, including 74,000 families with children. That is shocking and unacceptable in a civilised society. The figures reveal a failure to provide safe, permanent homes for those who need them.

Rough sleeping is driven by several factors, including relationship breakdown; benefit changes, which all too often push people into unaffordable housing; and poor mental or physical health, including substance dependence. Without proper housing those problems worsen, leading to more people on our streets and more strain on public services. Organisations such as Arc in Taunton do great work, particularly with veterans, whom we have heard about from several Members today. However, the Government need to provide the necessary funding for those services to continue. Under current plans, Government funding for the rough sleeping initiative is due to end in March next year, leaving many homelessness services facing a financial cliff edge of their own.

I therefore urge the Minister to ensure that funding is extended in the upcoming Budget to prevent the shocking numbers of rough sleepers that we have seen. I also urge the Government to recognise the general financial strain that local authorities are under, and act to ensure that they have sufficient resources to deliver the requirements of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 and to provide accommodation for survivors of domestic abuse.

Ultimately, we need long-term solutions not temporary measures, which is exactly what we set out in our manifesto. We would exempt homeless people from the punitive shared accommodation rate, which means they simply cannot afford to get the housing that they need, and give local authorities the funding that they need to meet the requirements of the Homelessness Reduction Act. We would introduce a new “somewhere safe to stay” legal duty, giving people emergency accommodation and an assessment of needs as of right if they are homeless and need it, and ban section 21 evictions, which we are delighted to see the Government moving forward on.

Because we cannot have Housing First without having the houses first, we want to see the Government build 150,000 new social and council rent homes per year. Homelessness and rough sleeping is not inevitable. It is time we built the homes and provided the services to bring it to an end.