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 is taking to reduce the number of homeless people under the age of 25.

The Government is committed to reducing homelessness and rough sleeping. That is why we introduced the Homelessness Reduction Act, the most ambitious reform to homelessness legislation in decades, on 3 of April 2018. The Act included changes to ensure that there is better support for young people, families and care leavers by ensuring that there are more opportunities to prevent or relieve homelessness.

In addition to this, we published a cross-government Rough Sleeping Strategy in August 2018, which set out an ambitious £100 million package to help people who sleep rough now and put in place the structures that will end rough sleeping once and for all. As part of the Strategy, my Department committed to developing the Young Future’s Fund - a social impact bond programme aimed at supporting vulnerable young people who are homeless or sleeping rough. This will build on the success of the Fair Chance Fund (2015-2017), which supported over 1,900 homeless young people to improve their accommodation, employment and education outcomes.

We have also put in place bespoke support for local authorities through our Homelessness Advice and Support Team, the team includes dedicated youth homelessness adviser roles which have a commitment to work with local authorities to proactively promote positive joint working across housing authorities and offering training, advice and support to all local authorities.

The Government is committed to building upon this work and to continue to bring down the number of young people without a home. The Government is committed to building on recent success of bringing down the number of homelessness acceptances for 16-17 year-olds.