Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps he plans to take to ensure that people are not placed in temporary accommodation for more than the legal six weeks limit.

Time spent in temporary accommodation means people are getting help and it ensures no family is without a roof over their head. The six week limit applies to Bed and Breakfast accommodation. The law is clear that households with dependent children should only be accommodated in B&Bs in an emergency, and then no longer than six weeks.

The Government is assisting areas to ensure that families spend no longer than 6 weeks in B&Bs, which includes protecting and maintaining homelessness prevention funding at £315 million as well as providing providing extra funding to 25 areas most in need.

We are also implementing the most ambitious legislative reform in decades, the Homelessness Reduction Act, in April 2018, which will ensure that more people get help earlier to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.

Our new Homelessness Advice and Support Team, drawn from local authorities and the homelessness sector, will provide support leading up to and following the commencement of the Act.

In addition, we have replaced DWP’s Temporary Accommodation Management Fee with a Flexible Homelessness Support Grant which local authorities can use more strategically to prevent and tackle homelessness. This amounts to £402 million over the two years from 2017/18.

Devolving the funding to local authorities will improve incentives to move families out of temporary accommodation and into settled accommodation more quickly. With more certain upfront funding local authorities will be able to tackle homelessness more pro-actively, pushing the balance of the investment away from crisis intervention and towards prevention.