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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what information his Department holds on how many people have died while sleeping rough in each of the last seven years; and what steps the Government is taking to help prevent people from becoming seriously ill or dying while sleeping rough.

No one should ever have to sleep rough. That is why this Government has committed to halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027.

The newly formed Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce will drive forward the implementation of a cross-Government strategy to achieve this.

At Autumn Budget 2017, we announced £28 million of funding to pilot the Housing First approach for some of the country’s most entrenched rough sleepers. This funding forms part of the £1 billion that the Government has allocated until 2020 to prevent and reduce homelessness and rough sleeping.