Homelessness
This service has a budget of £27.5m
Homelessness services have been crucial to our COVID-19 response, providing accommodation for people sleeping rough. This great achievement cost £7m up to March 2021, with another £7m allocated after that.
We anticipate that we will see an increase in people presenting as homeless because of the economic impact of the pandemic and the end of a ban on evictions. We want to be able to offer accommodation and support quickly to prevent people from sleeping rough. Longer-term, greater unknowns include the potential homelessness-related economic impact of COVID-19 on households, such as unemployment, debt, arrears and home loss.
The numbers in 'dispersed' housing with support to prepare for a permanent solution continued to rise from 1,491 in March 2019 to 1,901 in November 2020. Bed and breakfast accommodation during November averaged 223 single people and 25 families a night.
Over 9,840 households approached our service in 2019/20 and despite COVID-19 restrictions, we had 4,851 approaches from April to September 2020. We expect more of the same as unemployment and eviction figures increase due to COVID-19.
The current system cannot cope with the demand and the growing imbalance between need and affordable solutions. This will be worsened by the impact of COVID-19, particularly pent-up demand for homelessness services because of mental health, domestic abuse and the insecurity and unhealthiness of overcrowding and shared accommodation.
That is why we are taking a system-wide re-focus and re-designing the system based on reducing need and aimed at reducing rough sleeping and the cost and use of temporary accommodation.
See the full report- item 5h