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 has taken to work with homeless accommodation providers to ensure covid-secure provision.

We have taken unprecedented steps to provide rough sleepers with the COVID-secure accommodation they need during the pandemic. This work has not stopped, and by the end of January we had supported over 37,000 people, with over 11,000 in emergency accommodation and over 26,000 already moved into longer-term accommodation.

We are continuing to ask local councils to help more rough sleepers into COVID-secure accommodation and to ensure that their wider health needs are addressed, and have provided £10 million to enable them to do so. This builds on the package of winter support announced last year, which included a £10 million Cold Weather Fund for all local authorities to bring forward COVID-secure accommodation and £2 million funding for the faith, communities and voluntary sector to transform their traditional communal sleeping services into self-contained and COVID-secure accommodation.

We have also worked extensively with Public Health England to provide Operating Principles to help the sector open shelters as safely as possible where absolutely necessary, when self-contained accommodation cannot be made available and when local partners agree that it is the right thing to do.

On 25 February, the Secretary of State announced further voluntary sector funding that will enable local night shelters to provide COVID-secure, sustainable models of provision moving forwards.