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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of trends in the number of statutory homeless households between 2009-10 and 2015-16.

Homelessness acceptances remain less than half the 2003-4 peak, but one person without a home is still one too many. That is why we have protected £315 million for local authority homelessness prevention funding, and secured £139 million central government funding in this Parliament.

We have a strong homelessness safety net, but we want to go further by putting prevention at the heart of our approach to tackling homelessness. We are therefore supporting Bob Blackman MP’s Private Members’ Bill. The Homelessness Reduction Bill will significantly reform England’s homelessness legislation, ensuring that more people get the help they need earlier to prevent them from becoming homelessness in the first place.

The statutory homelessness statistics are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-homelessness