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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many (a) new houses have been built and (b) temporary accommodations have been made available for rough sleepers in each of the last three years.

My Department does not collect statistics on the allocation of new build properties or temporary accommodation.

At Budget, we announced £28 million of funding to pilot the Housing First approach for the country’s most entrenched rough sleepers. In addition to this, we announced £20 million of funding for schemes to enable better access to new tenancies or support to sustain existing tenancies in the private rented sector.

This funding forms part of the £1 billion that the Government has allocated until 2020 to prevent and reduce homelessness and rough sleeping. But nobody should ever have to sleep rough. That is why we have gone further and committed to halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. We have announced a new Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce, chaired by the Secretary of State, which will drive forward the implementation of a cross-Government strategy to tackle this issue.