Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government going to address the fact that we have never learned to turn the tap off? We have more and more people falling into homelessness from different sectors of society—people are having problems all over the place, as the noble Baroness said. My concern is this: we are always going on about the emergency, but where in the background are this Government or the next working on reducing homelessness by turning the tap off and getting rid of the inheritance of poverty, which is what produces most homelessness?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right in what he says. He will know that we have set a target of building 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament, which in the long term is the answer to tackling this issue. In the short term, we need to tackle the issue of many children spending years in temporary accommodation, when they need space to play and develop, at the same time increasing the funding to tackle the long-term causes of homelessness and poverty, which, as he rightly says, sit at the heart of this. The Renters’ Rights Bill, which is coming before this House very shortly, will tackle some of the causes of homelessness.