Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to address the rise in homeless patients presenting with mental illness at NHS (a) hospitals, (b) drop-in centres and (c) GP surgeries.

The Department for Communities and Local Government is working closely with the Department of Health on how we improve access to mental health services for rough sleepers, or those at risk of homelessness in England. The Government has committed over £1 billion until 2020 to local authorities to reduce homelessness and rough sleeping and has supported the Homelessness Reduction Act – due to commence in April 2018. The Act will ensure that people who are in need of assistance get the support they need before becoming homeless.

The Government is also supporting 84 projects, some specifically funding mental health interventions, across 205 district and unitary local authorities in England through its £50 million Homelessness Prevention Programme offering tailored support services for people who need it and rapid support for people to make a sustainable recovery from homelessness.

The Government has also set an aim to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminate it entirely by 2027. We are setting up a rough sleeping and homelessness taskforce and piloting a Housing First approach to tackle rough sleeping.

We expect local authorities, NHS England and clinical commissioning groups to all play a crucial role in achieving these. NHS England has published guidance for general practices and patients to ensure that homeless patients are still able to access primary care services. Public Health England’s guidance ‘Improving health through the home’ provides a single point of access to wide-ranging authoritative information on data, evaluation, evidence and research related to homelessness to support providers and commissioners, such as good practice prompts for commissioning for homeless people with drug or alcohol problems.