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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what estimate he has made of the number of homeless people in Cornwall; and what assessment he has made of the trend in the level of homelessness in that area in the past five years.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes regular statistics on rough sleeping, statutory homelessness and homelessness prevention and relief. These are published at a local authority level. The latest statistics can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/homelessness-statistics.

We are supporting 48 projects through our £20 million Rough Sleeping Grant, with £470,000 awarded to Cornwall for services to work in partnership and prevent people from sleeping rough through identifying those at risk as well as assisting people into emergency accommodation.

The Government remains committed to combating homelessness and rough sleeping. No one should ever have to sleep rough. That is why we are aiming to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminate it altogether by 2027. To achieve this, we have set up a Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce that will focus on prevention and affordable housing.

We also supported the Homelessness Reduction Act which commences in April 2018. The Act significantly reforms England’s homelessness legislation, ensuring that more people get the help they need earlier to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.