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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department took to ensure local authorities had adequate resources to meet their Severe Weather Emergency Protocol duties between November 2017 and March 2018.

Homeless Link publishes annual guidance on the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) and it is our expectation that local authorities work together with partners to provide basic emergency accommodation to minimise the risk of harm to individuals when the temperature drops. I recently wrote to local authorities about the guidance on SWEP which can help them protect rough sleepers in their areas at this time.

No one should ever have to sleep rough and that is why the Government has committed to halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. The Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce will drive forward the implementation of a cross-Government strategy to achieve this. The Taskforce met for the first time on 7 March 2018 and have committed to publishing the strategy by July this year. We have allocated over £1 billion through to 2020, following the 2015 Spending Review, to prevent and reduce all forms of homelessness, including rough sleeping.