Source · Select Committees · Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee
Recommendation 14
14
Paragraph: 47
No formal review of the Government’s manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping has yet happened,...
Recommendation
No formal review of the Government’s manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping has yet happened, due to the pandemic. We recommend the Government appoints a successor to Baroness Casey within the coming months to lead the review. This important work should not be delayed any further. The review must focus on learning lessons from the successes of Everyone In, most important of which is that, given a clear mandate and funding, we have the means to end most rough sleeping in this country. The Government must also reflect on its new data which shows for the first time that the scale of the problem of those rough sleeping or at risk of doing so is much higher than previously estimated.
Paragraph Reference:
47
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
When the pandemic began in March 2020, Baroness Casey volunteered to lead the government’s response to keep rough sleepers safe and subsequently led the COVID-19 Rough Sleeping Taskforce to deliver the next steps following the emergency response. We are very grateful to Baroness Casey for the vital role she played in our response to COVID-19. Baroness Casey stepped back from her role as the head of the Rough Sleeping Taskforce in August 2020 once we had dealt with the immediate issues and established a clear roadmap for supporting rough sleepers into more settled accommodation – and we are continuing this critical work. Since then, as we have been continuing to manage the response to the pandemic, it has not been the right time to return to the planned independent review. However, the Government is committed to ending rough sleeping within this parliament. The department will be working with partners across government and the sector to build on recent progress and consider what more needs to be done to end rough sleeping. We will carefully consider the role of health, justice, immigration and employment, alongside housing and how the department will build on the already significant success of Everyone In. This work will be underpinned by robust data and evidence. The annual rough sleeping snapshot provides a way of estimating the number of people sleeping rough on a single night in Autumn each year and assessing change over time. The latest ‘Everyone In’ figures provide an estimate of the number of people currently in emergency accommodation, as well as those who have moved into settled accommodation or a rough sleeping pathway outside emergency accommodation. The data sets are collecting different information for specific purposes, have different methodologies and are not comparable.