A leading charity has said the government is likely to miss its target to end rough sleeping in England by 2024, as it reports a rise in homelessness across the country amid the cost of living crisis.
Crisis said it was “incredibly disappointing” to see more people on the streets, and the success of the government’s Everyone In project, under which rough sleeping dropped to record lows during lockdown, had lost momentum.
“We need to see more political will and attention on this,” said Jasmine Basran, the head of policy and campaigns at the charity.
“The government does have a commitment to end rough sleeping, but the kind of action needed behind it, the political leadership, isn’t happening. Certainly from what our services are saying, we’re confident the target won’t be met without a huge shift in what the government are doing.”
Ahead of the annual rough sleeper snapshot, due to be published this week, Basran said the charity was seeing more first-time rough sleepers, in part due to a lack of affordable housing and the under-resourcing of support services.
Sharon Thompson, the councillor responsible for homelessness in Birmingham, said the number of rough sleepers in the city was expected to be higher than last year, although still lower than pre-Covid levels. She said many in the sector were frustrated that after the Everyone In campaign, the problem was no longer being given the priority it needed.
“In the pandemic, rough sleeping was seen as a public health emergency, and then all of a sudden, we’re no longer on this public health journey with them,” she said. “Since then there’s been a lot of lip service from the government. Ultimately, they’re not building enough social housing, and we can’t eliminate rough sleeping until we have a grownup conversation about migrants and people that are on the streets with no recourse to public funds.”
She was also concerned about broader homelessness across the city, fuelled by the cost of living crisis. Birmingham city council was seeing 500-600 people come forward as homeless each week, and “we’re not in the eye of the storm yet”, said Thompson.
Basran said most government funding to tackle the problem went towards crisis-point intervention rather than tackling the underlying issues that caused rough sleeping in the first place, of which there were many.
“We need to see things like the government unfreezing housing benefit and investing in mental health services if we want to reverse this trend,” she said. “We’ve also done research showing that the pressures on the NHS at the moment mean that hospitals are often trying to discharge people who are homeless as quickly as possible, even if they have nowhere to go.
“On top of that, our services are saying it’s probably been the most difficult we’ve ever seen, in terms of being able to find settled and secure housing for people.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “Preventing homelessness and rough sleeping is a government priority. That is why we are investing £2bn over three years to tackle the issue.
“This includes £360m for councils to ensure families are not left without a roof over their heads and £500m to support rough sleepers, helping to deliver thousands of bed spaces. We are also protecting the most vulnerable with £1,350 of direct support to millions of the most vulnerable this year.”
