Local authorities in England will receive the ‘largest ever’ cash injection into homelessness services next year, the Government has announced today.
Councils will get nearly £1bn ‘to help break the cycle of spiralling homelessness’, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said.
The funding includes £633m for the homelessness prevention grant, £185.6m for the rough sleeping prevention and recovery grant, and £58.7m for the rough sleeping drug and alcohol treatment grant.
The Local Government Association’s housing spokesperson, Adam Hug, said: ‘The new funding announced today will be a great help to councils as they seek to end homelessness, and will help to relieve some of the financial burden they are under.’
But the chief executive of Shelter, Polly Neate, said the cash injection was ‘just a sticking plaster’, stressing that ‘you cannot solve homelessness without homes’.
She said: ‘The only way to help families into a secure home and end homelessness for good is for the government to invest in building enough social homes with rents tied to local incomes – we need 90,000 a year for 10 years.’
The director of social change at Homeless Link, Fiona Colley, said: ‘Today’s announcement represents a win for the homelessness sector, fulfilling our ask of a one-year funding rollover so that services can continue to provide vital support to some of the most marginalised people in our society.’
But she urged councils not to use the homelessness prevention grant to ‘fill the temporary accommodation funding hole’, and said it should be used to deliver holistic homelessness prevention programmes.
