Homelessness: Funding

Naushabah Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. Before coming to this place, I worked on the frontline of homelessness policy at the charity St Mungo’s and also in the housing industry for over 15 years, as well as being cabinet member for housing at Medway council. Those experiences taught me how quickly people can fall into crisis when systems fail, and how powerful the right interventions can be when they are properly funded and sustained. It also highlighted how complex the homelessness landscape is, and how important it is that we have an integrated Housing First approach, driven by evidence.

Under the Tories, we saw rough sleeping more than double between 2010 and its peak, while local authorities faced a significant real terms reduction in core spending power—the very budgets that funded homelessness prevention. As a result, the system has become crisis-led, reactive and structurally incapable of meeting demand. Most strikingly, the Everyone In scheme demonstrated what is possible when homelessness is treated with the urgency it deserves, with over 37,000 people brought in off the streets overnight. It also highlighted the clear truth that rough sleeping is not an unsolvable issue, but a resource one.

When we talk about homelessness, we are not only talking about those who are rough sleeping. We are also talking about those who are sofa surfing, hidden homelessness, and thousands of families who are placed in temporary accommodation, often miles from their schools, support networks and places of work. For example, many London councils are placing people in my constituency, driving up prices locally but also putting a real pressure on an already overstretched local authority.

The scale of this crisis has got to the point where temporary accommodation has become a parallel housing system in its own right. Unfortunately it is no longer a safety net. Instead it is a symptom of a system under acute strain, and represents one of the clearest arguments for long-term, sustainable funding for homelessness prevention.

The Government’s commitment to significantly expand the supply of genuinely affordable and social homes will help to ease the relentless pressure on temporary accommodation, as more families can access stable, long-term housing, rather than being trapped in the cycle of emergency placements. However, we must be honest about these structural issues and we cannot shy away from addressing them at their root. I therefore urge the Minister, whose work I really respect in this area, to look closely at the local housing allowance and ensure it is set at a level that reflects real rental markets. It will be one of the most effective levers we have to preventing homelessness at scale, and it must be a part of any credible long-term strategy.

Finally, our approach to ending homelessness has been discussed for many years. The solutions that can work are ready and available. Now is the time for action.