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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) veterans sleeping rough and (b) homeless veterans in (i) Liverpool, Wavertree constituency, (ii) Liverpool, (iii) the Liverpool City Region and (iv) each region in each year since 2010.

One person without a home is too many. Homelessness robs families of their future, safety and self-worth, and we refuse to accept this. Although only 3% of individuals seen sleeping rough in London are UK nationals with a history of service in the armed forces, this is still too high, and no way to treat our veterans (https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/chainreports/resource/6c740944-3816-4f21-bbcf-04505b59c76b#).

We are committed to fight for all those who have fought for us. All local authorities in England are signed up to the Armed Forces Covenant, ensuring they support the needs of their armed forces communities. We have committed over £500 million to tackle homelessness over the next four years as set out at the last Spending Review.

We have also given our support to the Homelessness Reduction Bill, to reform England’s homelessness legislation and ensure that more people get the help they need to prevent a homelessness crisis in the first place.

We have gone further and announced a £40 million Homelessness Prevention Programme to ensure there is an end-to-end approach to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, and provide the support people need to recover from homelessness.