Ending Homelessness

Paula Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Paula Barker (Liverpool Wavertree) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. As co-chair of the APPG for ending homelessness and the co-sponsor of this debate, I thank all colleagues who have attended; our new Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern); Crisis, the secretariat for the APPG; and our fantastic steering group, comprised of organisations that support people who are homeless.

This debate comes at a vital moment. In 2023-24, some 1,611 people died while homeless—up 16% on the previous year. Eleven of them were children. Four were babies aged under one. Long-term rough sleeping is up 13% compared with last year, and long-term rough sleepers now outnumber those who are new to the streets. We have already waited long enough to see a strategy that addresses the moral injustice of homelessness, and I hope the Minister can share an update on progress.

The Prime Minister was absolutely correct to say in Liverpool that we must renew Britain. However, true renewal is possible only with deep roots and strong foundations. We often talk about the importance of a home as a foundation for a good life. Today, I would like to set out how ensuring that the cross-departmental strategy for homelessness delivers secure, affordable homes for everyone can be the foundation of a good society and a better Britain—a country where parents know they will be able to feed their kids after they have paid their rent, where workers can focus on their job and not where they are going to sleep that night, and where people are welcomed into secure communities, not left on the streets.

The latest report of the APPG for ending homelessness, “Homes, Support, Prevention—Our Foundations For Ending Homelessness”, sets a clear blueprint to build that foundation, and I urge the Minister to consider it. The report includes the ambition of halving the use of temporary accommodation and ending rough sleeping by 2030. I am incredibly proud that in their time in office the last Labour Government managed to drastically reduce rough sleeping and the use of temporary accommodation. As an heir to that Government, will the Minister commit to that target and to emulating the progress made on this issue by her Labour predecessors?

This is no utopian target. Our report sets out how to get there by delivering social homes, improving support systems and prioritising prevention to address the root causes of homelessness. On that first point, I welcome the new Secretary of State’s enthusiasm for building and his recognition that we need homes to end homelessness, but England has seen a net loss of 180,000 secure, truly affordable social homes over the last decade, and we must be mindful that our current plans will not match the 90,000 social homes a year that the National Housing Federation and Crisis have calculated we need. It is therefore doubly important that the homes built are accessible to people experiencing homelessness.

For example, domestic abuse survivors often have to leave at short notice, with little to no help. Although the changes to the local connection rule for survivors are welcome, it remains the leading cause of homelessness among women. Too often, survivors cannot access a secure home. When compiling evidence for our APPG report, we heard a heartbreaking story from a survivor of domestic abuse who had been stuck in temporary accommodation so filthy that she could not let her children play on the floor. Will the Minister set out how she intends to work with the Housing Minister on the long-term housing plan and with the Safeguarding Minister on the violence against women and girls strategy, to ensure that those plans complement her own strategy and that every survivor who takes the decision to leave has a secure home to go to? Will she also consider a full roll-out of the “whole housing” approach?

On improving support, the evidence we collected from frontline services and homeless charities was clear: they need to secure funding to deliver effective support for people with multiple needs who need more than a home to end their homelessness. People and local authorities are trapped in a cycle in which the scale of urgent need is overwhelming services, leading to worse outcomes despite higher spending. The National Audit Office gave evidence that the current system was “unsustainable” and over-focused on crisis management, not prevention. We need to break the cycle with both an emergency response to spiralling rates of homelessness and an ambitious, resourced plan to transform homelessness support within a decade. Will the Minister commit to matching the calls for homelessness funding to be consolidated, flexible to needs and based on multi-annual contracts?

Finally, on prevention, the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) spoke about the importance of breaking down silos in public services, but it is also important that broader departmental spending decisions do not cause homelessness. For example, when compiling our report, the APPG heard evidence from charities and local authorities that the decision by the Department for Work and Pensions to freeze local housing allowance is making homes unaffordable as rents continue to rise. I can see that playing out in my Liverpool Wavertree constituency: according to analysis by Crisis and data from Zoopla, just three in every 100 properties advertised for rent last year were affordable for people who rely on local housing allowance.

When people inevitably miss out, they have nowhere to go but the local authority. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that council spending on TA is spiralling, with a 25% rise across England in the last year alone, and as the Minister has rightly identified, record numbers of children are now homeless and housed in temporary accommodation. Does the Minister agree that although the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has every right to be prudent, we cannot simply ignore the economic reality of how much it costs to rent a home and ask local authorities and society to pick up the pieces?

Will the Minister also consider rolling out Housing First? The pilots in Greater Manchester, the Liverpool city region and the west midlands achieved 84% tenancy sustainment—84% of people sustained long-term tenancies after three years—and measurable cost savings. Analysis from the Centre for Social Justice finds that for every £1 invested in Housing First, the public purse saves £2 through reduced A&E, policing and justice costs.

Social homes, secure support and a truly preventive system that helps people to avoid homelessness are the kind of common-sense steps that will build the foundation of a Britain that we can all be proud of at the next election.

[Several hon. Members rose—]