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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government on the potential merits of recording the number of street homeless veterans moved to temporary accommodation during the covid-19 outbreak.

During the COVID-19 pandemic MHCLG asked all local authorities to provide information on their rough sleeping cohort in order to support local authorities to make offers of accommodation to people who were sleeping rough, in shared sleeping sites, such as night shelters, or considered to be at risk of rough sleeping, to reduce the risk faced by some of the most vulnerable in society. This collection of data does not record information on whether someone is a veteran or not.

H-CLIC (Homelessness Case Level Information Collection) is still the main vehicle to capture more detailed data on those offered assistance under a Housing Act duty. Any rough sleeper helped under a Housing Act duty should have their data recorded on the H-CLIC system, including those that are ex-armed forces personnel. We anticipate publishing H-CLIC data for the April 2020 to June 2020 period in autumn 2020.

In May 2020, we published the latest H-CLIC data for the October to December 2019 period. In this dataset, there were 470 households that required additional support because they contained ex armed forces personnel. This represents less than 1 per cent, of the 67,280 households that were owed a homelessness duty.