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 has taken to reduce the number of homeless rough sleepers in (a) Coventry and (b) England in (i) each of the last 10 years and (ii) during the covid-19 outbreak.

This Government has taken unprecedented steps to protect rough sleepers during the pandemic. This work has not stopped, and through Everyone In, by November 2020 we had supported around 33,000 people with nearly 10,000 in emergency accommodation and over 23,000 already moved on into longer-term accommodation.

This additional support builds on the package of winter support announced last year. This includes a £10 million Cold Weather Fund for all local authorities to bring forward COVID-secure accommodation this winter and to keep vulnerable people safe. This sits alongside the Protect programme, which provides targeted support to local authorities with higher numbers of rough sleepers to meet the specific challenges they face.

We have also been in close contact with councils to develop plans for the coming months, supported by the Next Steps Accommodation Programme, which aims to ensure that as few people as possible return to the streets. This includes bringing forward more than 3,000 new homes this year for rough sleepers, backed by £150 million,.

Given the new variant of COVID-19, and the latest national lockdown, we are redoubling our efforts to ensure that people who sleep rough are kept as safe as possible and that we do everything we can to protect the NHS.  This is backed by £10 million to protect rough sleepers and ensure their wider health needs are addressed.

We have asked all local authorities to ensure that even more rough sleepers are safely accommodated and will be asking that this opportunity is actively used to make sure that all rough sleepers are registered with a GP where they are not already and are factored into local area vaccination plans, in line with JCVI prioritisation for COVID vaccinations. This will help ensure that the wider health needs of people who sleep rough are addressed, supporting them now and for the future.

Coventry has received £1,354,795 to support rough sleepers including those accommodated during the pandemic during cold weather. This includes funding from the Rough Sleeping Initiative, funding for interim support and accommodation for those supported during the pandemic and cold weather funding.

Coventry also received £1,039,542 for wider homelessness work, with £300,987 Homelessness Reduction Grant and £738,555 Flexible Homelessness Support Grant allocated to fund homelessness services.

In 2020/21, Coventry received £2,307,543 Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme (RSAP) funding to provide an additional 32 units of long-term accommodation for rough sleepers and those at risk of rough sleeping. Coventry were also part of a partnership bid submitted by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) to provide a further 25 units of long-term accommodation of which 5 will be delivered in Coventry.

WMCA are also part of our Housing First pilots and the funding allocation across the combined authority is up to £9.6 million over three years between 2018/19 to 2021/22.