Government To Hold Homelessness Summit As Sector Calls For More Urgency
The government is set to hold two key meetings on homelessness, PoliticsHome understands. (Alamy)
3 min read
The government is being urged to step up its efforts to reduce homelessness as it prepares to host a summit on tackling rough sleeping.
Ministers have invited stakeholders to this month's summit, the first since Angela Rayner resigned from her role as housing secretary in September, and are also expected to meet MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Ending Homelessness next week.
Rayner resigned as housing secretary, as well as deputy prime minister, in early September after being found to have breached the ministerial code over unpaid stamp duty.
She was in charge of homelessness policy while in post, and stakeholders have expressed concern that momentum in government to tackle the issue has fallen off since her departure.
Matthew Downie, chief executive at the homelessness charity Crisis, told PoliticsHome that contact with the Labour government had "gone quiet" since Rayner had left office.
"There was a period of time when our sector was very close to Angela Rayner, and there was a lot of active conversation," he said, adding that he had not yet had the opportunity to speak to her successor, Steve Reed, or the homelessness minister Alison McGovern.
A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson told PoliticsHome: “We are leading cross-government work to develop a homelessness strategy to get us back on track to ending all forms of homelessness.
“As part of this work, we are hosting a Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy Summit with the sector to discuss the direction of the strategy, and will also be meeting the APPG and other parliamentarians next week.”
According to data from the Museum of Homelessness published this month, 1,611 people died while homeless in the UK in 2024, a nine per cent increase on the previous year. Government data also released this month said that 324,990 households were assessed as owed a homelessness duty, due to being threatened with homelessness or already being homeless in 2023/24, an increase on the year before.
At the end of last year, the government announced that it was giving councils nationwide nearly £1bn to tackle homelessness. Last month, Reed announced an additional £84m that would be prioritised for families and children in temporary accommodation this winter.
Ahead of the summit, Downie told PoliticsHome said it was "frustrating" that stakeholders like Crisis had not yet seen the homelessness strategy.
"When you run services like we do for 10,000 people, you can't look people in the eye and say: 'Oh, don't worry, there's a Whitehall meeting coming up in a few weeks'," he said.
Paula Barker, Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree and co-chair of the Ending Homelessness APPG, welcomed the meetings but said it was "disappointing" not to have been contacted by the government about them at the time of writing.
"As co-chair of the APPG on ending homelessness, I am a key stakeholder, and to see the fact that I have not been reached out to is disappointing, to be honest," she said.
"When I was shadow minister, my team and I developed all sorts of policies, and at the heart of that was the cross-departmental strategy, which, obviously, was headed up by Angela [Rayner]."
