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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what recent assessment he has made of the number of acute bed spaces available for young people in crisis in Birmingham and the West Midlands.

As part of the Homelessness Case Level Collection data (H-CLIC), local authorities are required to collect details of the number of young people needing support to manage independently, this data is published here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/homelessness-statistics.

This Government is committed to reducing the need for temporary accommodation by preventing homelessness before it occurs. That is why we are spending £2 billion over the next three years to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping.

The Government is committed to tackling all forms of homelessness and the Homelessness Reduction Act places duties on local housing authorities to take reasonable steps to try to prevent and relieve a person’s homelessness.

This means that many more young people who may not previously have been eligible for support, are now being helped to prevent homelessness before it even occurs.

In December 2021, we announced £316 million in funding for the Homelessness Prevention Grant in 2022/23. Local authorities can use the funding flexibly to meet their homelessness and rough sleeping strategies – for example, to offer financial support for people to find a new home, to work with landlords to prevent evictions or to provide temporary accommodation, among other preventative measures.