Sleeping Rough: West Midlands

(asked on 30th December 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to tackle rough sleeping in (a) Worcestershire and (b) the West Midlands.


Answered by
Kelly Tolhurst Portrait
Kelly Tolhurst
This question was answered on 15th January 2021

This Government is committed to ending rough sleeping. This is why we are spending over £700 million to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping this year alone.

As part of this, we have allocated significant funding to Worcestershire and the West Midlands. Worcestershire is receiving over £672,000 from the Rough Sleeping Initiative, which supports the establishment or enhancement of coordinated local services for rough sleepers or those at risk of sleeping rough. Local authorities across the West Midlands have been allocated £6.49 million in total from the Rough Sleeping Initiative this year.

Building on the success of the ongoing Everyone In programme, the Next Steps Accommodation programme makes available the financial resources needed to support local authorities and their partners to prevent as many of those as possible accommodated during the pandemic from returning to the streets. In total, local authorities across the West Midlands will receive £4.78 million to pay for immediate support to help prevent people from returning to the streets in 2020/21. Worcester and Wychavon have been allocated over £445,000 as part of this funding. We are also providing £5.95 million in capital funding and £2.65 million in revenue funding, to deliver longer term move-on accommodation and support for rough sleepers across the West Midlands.

Our expert rough sleeping and homelessness advisers continue to work closely with all local authorities in the West Midlands, to support and monitor their work to tackle rough sleeping.

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