Housing, Communities and Local Government: Departmental Spending

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

My contribution to today’s debate is on the eye-watering £1 billion spend by the Ministry on temporary accommodation. There are now 88,330 families trapped in temporary accommodation, including 128,340 children. These families have spent lockdown in hostels, warehouses and B&Bs, including 530 children who have been stuck in the latter for longer than the six-week legal limit. The scale of our housing crisis means that local authorities cannot even find temporary accommodation locally: 28% of families are sent far away from home, and away from friends, work and school. That is 24,430 households being moved from one borough to another, with local authorities playing chequers with people’s lives.

But the question is not how many, but who, where and how far away. So I commend the extraordinary investigation by ITV’s “Ross Kemp: Living with…” programme last Thursday, which revealed the detail behind these statistics and the impact that being sent across the country has on families’ lives.

In the past two years, homeless families have moved 400,000 miles across the country, which is the equivalent of 16 times around the planet. Councils in every region are sending families hundreds of miles away from home. There is a statutory duty for households in temporary accommodation to be housed in their home borough, or as close to it as possible. There is also a statutory duty on local authorities to inform receiving councils when they send homeless families to their borough. That groundbreaking programme found at least 60 councils that had failed to do so. The leader of Basildon Council even stated that 58% of the time a family arrive in his borough his council is not notified. That means that in the past four years more than 700 children have arrived in Basildon from London, putting the most extraordinary pressure on schools, GPs and hospitals, but putting even more pressure on these individual families, who are cut off from the support and help that they need. When will the Government enforce the law that already exists?