In the last Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) before Christmas, Keir Starmer failed to treat the scourge of homelessness as a national emergency.
Starmer responded to a question on housing:
Record numbers sleeping rough, almost 160,000 children living in temporary accommodation. Mr Speaker, we’re delivering nearly £1bn into councils to tackle homelessness
That’s welcome, but the headline figure is actually only a 16.3% increase on funding from the previous year. And that increase is on the back of a 35% cut to councils’ housing budgets between 2010-2023.
Corbyn: “There will be no more homeless people”
By contrast, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he would’ve ended homelessness. He remarked that on day one of his premiership he would’ve said:
‘Today, rough sleeping [and] homelessness ends. There will be no more homeless people in this country. The state will provide’. That was going to be my opening gambit.
Indeed, a city in Canada announced it ended chronic homelessness in 2021 through simply housing people. Multiple studies from the US, Canada and one from Crisis in the UK sugggest that housing homeless people actually saves countries money through reduced policing, healthcare and alternative arrangement bills.
Housing First schemes can benefit homeless people’s lives through putting them in a better position to face addiction and mental health problems. Heroin will seem more attractive when you’re living on the streets. Usually policy functions like this: sort out your problems first, then you can access a home. The studies suggest it’s much more effective to reverse this approach.
And Corbyn was up for doing this, while Starmer’s counterproductive penny pinching allows the problem to continue.
PMQs: “shocked but not surprised”
Converting empty properties into council housing should be the priority. There are over 1.5 million vacant homes in the UK. That’s more than four times the number of individual homeless people, which stands at around 354,000 – a 14% rise on last year.
And since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled. There are 3,900 people sleeping rough on any given night.
Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, said:
I’m shocked but I’m not surprised. This rise has been happening year on year for the seven years I’ve been at Shelter and the number of children who are homeless has also increased every year.
Meanwhile, the overall housing strategy should be ending the artificial bubble through providing housing at cost price to people, paid in affordable monthly sums.
Featured image via Guardian News – YouTube and ITV News – YouTube
