Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of rough sleeping in (a) Birmingham, (b) the West Midlands and (c) England; and if he will make a statement.

This Government is determined to do more to reduce the number of people sleeping rough. We have established a new Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Implementation Taskforce, chaired by the Secretary of State, which will drive forward the implementation of a cross-Government strategy to tackle this issue.

We have allocated over £1 billion up to 2020 to support these efforts including piloting a Housing First approach for the most entrenched rough sleepers in the 3 major areas of England – the West Midlands Combined Authority, Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region.

From April 2018 we are implementing the Homelessness Reduction Act, the biggest change to homelessness legislation in decades, which will require councils to provide early support to people at risk of homelessness and rough sleeping.

DCLG publishes regular statistics on rough sleeping which are published at national, London and local authority level. The latest statistics can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/homelessness-statistics