Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many rough sleepers there are in Havering; and how many have been deported by his Department's Rough Sleeper Support Service in each of the last three years.

According to the 2018/2019 report produced by the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN), which is publicly available online and can be accessed by anyone, 32 people were seen sleeping rough in Havering across the course of that year. CHAIN is a multi-agency database recording information about rough sleepers and the wider street population in London.

The Rough Sleeping Support Service, which was first announced in August 2018 as part of the Government’s Rough Sleeping Strategy, was introduced to help non-UK nationals sleeping rough resolve their immigration cases and access the support that they need. It does not undertake any enforcement action. It has an administrative role, conducting status checks, identifying priority cases and ensuring that we can help those who require evidence of their immigration status or assistance in leaving the UK.

The Home Office may take action on a case-by-case basis where individuals have exhausted all other avenues and are unwilling to leave the UK voluntarily. This is in line with existing immigration law.

Removals of non-UK rough sleepers cannot be disaggregated in the published statistics on the removal of those without lawful status. It is also not possible to directly attribute removals to interaction with the RSSS because a range of factors will have affected how decisions were reached in these cases. A person’s removal from the UK is determined by their immigration
status and circumstances, including unwillingness to depart voluntarily, not by contact with the RSSS.