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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what proportion of the £28 million funding for Housing First pilot schemes he plans to allocate to projects in the Kirklees local authority area.

At Autumn Budget 2017, the Chancellor announced £28 million of funding to pilot the Housing First approach for some of the country’s most entrenched rough sleepers. The pilots will cover the West Midlands Combined Authority, Greater Manchester, and the Liverpool City Region.

This action builds on wider action that we have taken to achieve our manifesto commitment of halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. This includes:

• establishing the Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce, to drive forward the implementation of a cross-Government strategy;

• allocating over £1 billion to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping through to 2020; and

• implementing the most ambitious legislative reform in this area in decades: the Homelessness Reduction Act.

The Department for Communities and Local Government 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