Housing Justice urges Government to go further on reducing rough sleeping
February 25, 2021
Official figures released today by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government show the number of rough sleepers counted on a single night in England in Autumn 2020 stands at 2,688. Compared to the figure from a year ago, which stood at 4,266 this figure represents a decrease of 1,578 people or 37 %.
However this year’s number is still 52% higher than in 2010 and comes in the year the government and local councils have taken unprecedented action on rough sleeping, following public health risks owing to the pandemic. Under the Everybody In scheme and the Protect Programme, local councils have been encouraged to accommodate people found sleeping rough in hotels and self-contained accommodation.
Night Shelters, such as those supported by the Housing Justice Winter Night Shelter Network were advised to close during the first wave of the pandemic, given the transmission risk of COVID 19 in shared sleeping spaces. At the start of the first wave of the pandemic in March 2020, approximately 1,000 people were moved from night shelters in to self-contained or single room accommodation, predominantly in hotels. The Everybody In initiative has been estimated to have saved 266 lives.
Over the Summer and early Autumn Housing Justice worked with more than 100 winter night shelters in England to redesign their services away from communal settings. This resulted in more than 700 self contained beds in the winter of 2020/21 with funding to make those projects as secure as possible; the largest ever investment in Winter Night Shelters.
For a rough sleeper to be included in the count, there are strict criteria, with the government definition counting ‘people sleeping, or bedded down, in the open air (such as on the streets, or in doorways, parks or bus shelters), people in buildings or other places not designed for habitation (such as barns, sheds, car parks, cars, derelict boats, stations, or ‘bashes’)’.
Housing Justice Chief Executive, Kathy Mohan said,
“Today’s announcement of the snapshot count provides an insight into one of the few positive stories of COVID-19. It is to the huge credit of the thousands of people experiencing rough sleeping, volunteers, charity workers, faith groups, local authority staff and civil servants who have worked together to ensure that the number of people sleeping on our streets has fallen this year.
But we should all be wary of celebrating too early. Thousands of people still slept out this year and thousands more remain in hotels across the country without a clear route to a stable housing situation. The lessons of the last year are clear: government intervention works, specifically: bringing people inside regardless of their nationality, increasing Universal Credit, banning bailiff evictions and funding local authorities and grassroots charities to build local solutions to rough sleeping.
Ministers and the government now face a big choice, do they want to continue the good work of the last year or become a country that knows what works to end rough sleeping but lacks the political will to finish the job.
We urge the government to keep going and to do more, keep up the investment and the pragmatic attitude to doing what works to get people off the streets.”