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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what the evidential basis is for his Department’s 18 April 2020 statement that 90 per cent of rough sleepers known to local authorities at the beginning of the covid-19 outbreak have been made offers of accommodation.

My Department asked all local authorities to provide information on their rough sleeping cohort in order to support local authorities to make offers of accommodation to as many people who required it to reduce the risk faced by some of the most vulnerable in society.

At the beginning of this crisis, local authorities across England provided an estimate of the total number of people sleeping rough and in accommodation with communal sleeping spaces, such as night shelters, and have then updated us on the total number of people who have had offers of accommodation made available to them.