National Plan to End Homelessness

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

As part of the strategy, I have worked closely with my colleagues in the Home Office to support their priorities, which are to secure our borders, deal with the dreadful criminality of people trafficking across borders and get the backlog down. That is the best way to achieve what the right hon. Gentleman suggests, which is to have the resources to support people who have fled conflict and need to rebuild their lives. We want to ensure, through this strategy, that we get help quickly to the people whose cases have been decided, with the outcome that they are a refugee and will be settling in the UK. That means councils knowing where the people are and the support being available. I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for that approach.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

As my hon. Friend knows, homelessness pressures in Oxford are some of the worst in the whole country. Will she join me in commending Oxford city council’s plan to purchase 260 additional homes for temporary accommodation to get kids out of hotel rooms and other unsuitable accommodation and into decent-quality, much cheaper accommodation? What will she do to back initiatives such as that and to preserve councils’ ability to impose requirements on developers so that they also provide social accommodation?

[Alison McGovern]

I will join my right hon. Friend in commending Oxford city council’s plans. That is exactly the sort of action that this strategy envisages. We must get kids out of totally unsuitable B&B accommodation and help councils to have the resources to acquire much better accommodation that can stabilise family life. In order to back councils to do that, we have the £950 million local authority housing fund, which I mentioned earlier. I want to see local authorities charging forward to tackle this problem. Oxford’s council is not the only one that is getting this right—there are others across the country—but I would encourage all local authorities to look at the approach that Oxford is taking.