Homelessness Reduction Bill supported by Committee
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Posted 20.10.16
New research from homelessness charity St Mungo's has revealed that 129 rough sleepers died in London since 2010 - an average of one rough sleeper dying every fortnight.
The Charity's report - Nowhere safe to stay: the dangers of sleeping rough - sheds light on the dangers of sleeping on the streets for those who experience it on a daily basis, including violence, assault, suicide and abuse.
It also highlights how people who turn to councils for help are often being sent away without support or even instructed to sleep rough in order to access services.
The report highlights how a gap in the law means that the statutory protections afforded to families with children and very vulnerable adults miss out people who are left to face extreme risk on the streets.
Although no official national data exists, new analysis for this report from a search of press stories found 97 cases of people who died while sleeping rough in England in the past five years - with one in four experiencing a violent death.
The research also highlights that people sleeping rough are at a high risk of being attacked. A quarter (ten in 40) of the St Mungo's clients interviewed for the report had been the victim of physical assaults while sleeping rough.
Three quarters (33 in 40) had slept rough the night after asking the council for help because they were homeless.
In 2015-16, half of 672 UK nationals who used the London No Second Night Out service for new rough sleepers had asked councils for help in the 12 months before they started sleeping rough.
The number of people sleeping rough in England has doubled over the last five years, from 1,768 in 2010 to 3,569 in 2015. Last year alone, rough sleeping increased by 30%. In London 8,096 were recorded as sleeping rough during 2015-16 on the CHAIN database.
St Mungo's is calling on the Government to urgently bring forward a new strategy to end rough sleeping and ensure that nobody is turned away by their council when they have nowhere safe to stay, no matter where they are in the country.
Click here to download the report.
Posted 16.10.16
The Communities and Local Government Committee published its report in support of legislation aimed at reducing homelessness by ensuring that vulnerable people receive consistently high levels of service from local housing authorities across the county.
The Committee welcomes the Homelessness Reduction Bill's focus on homelessness prevention. It also supports the Bill's requirement for the Government to provide a mandatory code of practice for councils and for local housing authorities (LHA) to carry out assessments of all homelessness applications they receive.
The Committee has conducted pre-legislative scrutiny of the Private Members' Bill, which has been tabled by one of its members, Bob Blackman MP, to implement some of the recommendations of its report on homelessness, published in August 2016. This process has no direct precedent in Parliament.
The new report recommends changes to the Bill, which include adding domestic violence victims to the list of people for whose needs a local authority's advice must be especially designed to meet.
The Committee also calls for consideration of a stronger duty for councils to accommodate certain groups within a reasonable distance of their last address, such as those with mental health conditions or with children in school.
Click here for a summary of the report.
Click here for a conclusions and recommendations of the report.
