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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what action they intend to take, through housing associations, local authorities, and social landlords, to bring into use empty properties over shops, in particular for rough sleepers and families housed in bed and breakfast accommodation.

One person without a home is one too many and we are determined to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping.

Local authorities have powers and strong incentives to tackle empty homes, and through the New Homes Bonus they earn the same financial reward for bringing an empty home back into use as building a new one. To go even further, we recently announced proposals to strengthen the powers available to local authorities to tackle empty homes which mean that local authorities will be able to charge a 100 per cent council tax premium (currently 50 per cent) to homes that have been empty for more than two years.

In order to place homeless households into settled accommodation more quickly, we changed the law in 2011 to allow councils to place families in decent and affordable private rented homes.

The Rough Sleeping and Homelessness Reduction Taskforce will drive forward the implementation of a cross Government strategy to achieve our commitment of halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. The Taskforce met for the first time on 7^th March and we will publish the strategy by July this year.