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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many people in the UK have been placed in emergency housing as a result of a risk of homelessness in (a) March and (b) April 2020.

Over 90 per cent of rough sleepers known to councils at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis have now been made offers of safe accommodation and we have announced Dame Louise Casey will spearhead the next phase of the Government’s support for rough sleepers during the pandemic. As a result, we are ensuring some of the most vulnerable in society are protected from the pandemic. This includes those rough sleeping or who have been living in accommodation with communal sleeping spaces such as night shelters.

We have overhauled statutory homelessness data collection alongside the introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act. This will give us better insights into the causes of homelessness and the support people need. The new statutory homelessness data collection is called H-CLIC.

MHCLG publishes the H-CLIC data return on homelessness applications on a quarterly basis. The next statistics are due to be published in the coming weeks