Want to know why homelessness has risen? Tory cuts | Alan Fraser

Housing providers like us have tackled complex problems and kept people off the streets, but funding has been slashed

The homelessness minister Heather Wheeler has admitted that she “doesn’t know” why rough sleeping has risen so much in the past seven years. As the chief executive of the YMCA in Birmingham, I can tell her: it’s because years of cuts to services for vulnerable people are adding up.

Let’s start with housing benefit cuts for EU migrants. In 2015, the government changed the law so EU citizens would have to show they’d been in employment for at least six months before they were allowed to claim benefits. This change wasn’t a problem for most EU citizens, who either don’t need housing benefit, or claim it for short periods between paid employment. But there were some who paid their rent with housing benefit. It also affected EU workers in the informal economy doing cash-in-hand work that makes it hard to demonstrate a history of legitimate employment. Such people were in the country wholly legally and so couldn’t be deported, but were effectively rendered destitute. The street was the only option.

In 2003 we were funded to employ one support worker for every eight residents. Today we have one worker for every 18

Related: If you’re homelessness minister, maybe you should know something about it | Neil Coyle

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Continue reading... March 21, 2018 at 03:21PM