I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to place a duty on local authorities to ensure that persons for whom a homeless duty has been accepted are accommodated in the local area, including on discharge into private rented accommodation; to require local authorities to publish annual reports on steps relating to housing demand and supply taken or intended to be taken to meet that duty; and for connected purposes.
Listen to anyone who has been through the experience of homelessness and it will become clear that losing your home is one of the most traumatising things that can happen. Yet homelessness is a reality for tens of thousands of people every year, and over the past 30 years, since the repossessions crisis that followed the 1990 recession, successive waves of families and individuals have had to live through it, and they have done so in the context of a shrinking supply of stable, affordable social housing to meet need. That shrinking of supply and the ratcheting down of support for housing costs as rents have risen have both caused homelessness and made it increasingly difficult for many councils to meet their local needs.
Housing legislation requires all local housing authorities to secure accommodation in their own district, as far as reasonably practical. In response to a debate in my name last December, the then Housing Minister said:
“We are clear that local authorities should, as far as possible, avoid placing households out of their boroughs...that should really be a last resort.”—[Official Report, 2 December 2020; Vol. 685, c. 183WH.]
Yet that is clearly and obviously not the case and not adhered to in practice. My own borough of Westminster routinely accommodates homeless families out of borough: 55% of the 2,217 homeless households from Westminster were out of borough last year, up on the year before. The council has now also stated its intention to further cut costs by discharging homelessness duty into the private rented sector for 500 more households.
London as a whole is the worst-affected region in the country. There were 16.7 households per 1,000 in London living in temporary accommodation last year, compared with just 1.8 per 1,000 households in the rest of England. In the last full year to 2020, 19,727 of those homeless households were found out-of-area housing in London, which is 56.8%, while a quarter—25%—were not even in their sub-region and 2,559 were placed outside London.
Even across the country as a whole, a quarter of homeless households are accommodated out of area, because councils cannot find suitable properties for them. This is not, of course, to denigrate the places where disproportionate numbers of homeless households end up—quite the reverse. It is to point out the manifest unfairness of requiring some of the poorest and most stressed boroughs to take an ever larger share of homeless households from other places, increasing pressure on their housing stock and other services. As we know, it also leads to the use of substandard properties thrown up under permitted development rules in places such as Harlow, Merton and Croydon.