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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, if he will take steps to ensure that reviews decisions by local authorities to rule that a person is intentionally homeless are conducted by people independent of that authority.

The homelessness legislation gives households rights to request a review of local authority homelessness decisions. A review may be carried out by the housing authority itself or by someone acting as an agent of the housing authority. Where the review is to be carried out by an officer of the housing authority, the officer must not have been involved in the original decision, and must be senior to the officer who took the original decision.