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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what recent steps his Department has taken to reduce homelessness.

The Government is committed to reducing homelessness and rough sleeping. No one should ever have to sleep rough. That is why we have made a manifesto commitment to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and end it altogether by 2027, placing a priority on preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place.

Last summer we published the cross-government Rough Sleeping Strategy. This sets out an ambitious £100 million package to help people who sleep rough now, but also puts in place the structures that will end rough sleeping once and for all. The Government has now committed over £1.2 billion to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping over the spending review period.

Ahead of the Rough Sleeping Strategy we announced a new Rough Sleeping Initiative in order to have an immediate impact on reducing the levels of rough sleeping.

The measures within the initiative include:

• a cross-government, multi-disciplinary new Rough Sleeping Team;

• a £30 million fund for 2018-19 for local authorities with high number of people sleeping rough;

• a further £45 million fund for 2019-20 to help tackle rough sleeping.

In its first year, our Rough Sleeping Initiative (RSI) provided over 1,750 new bed spaces and 500 staff. This year we have expanded the RSI with investment of £46 million for 246 areas – providing funding for an estimated 2,600 bed spaces and 750 staff.

In April 2018 the Homelessness Reduction Act, the most ambitious legislative reform on this issue in decades, came into force. The Act transforms the culture of homelessness service delivery. It placed new duties on local housing authorities to take reasonable steps to try to prevent and relieve a person’s homelessness.