The British government has announced the largest ever cash boost to tackle soaring destitution in England, which Minister for Homelessness Rushanara Ali has admitted is the worst housing crisis in living memory.
Councils across the country will receive almost £1 billion ($1.27 billion) in new funding next year, it was revealed on Tuesday. The amount is equal to what councils spent on temporary accommodation for homeless families over the past year, recent figures show.
The funding aims to prevent households becoming homeless in the first place.
Earlier this month, housing charity Shelter reported that homelessness had risen by 14% in a year, with at least 354,000 people homeless in England, including 161,500 children.
The charity previously called on the government to invest in genuinely affordable social homes instead of sinking billions into temporary solutions every year.
The Labor government has said that successive years of failure to invest in prevention had resulted in a record number of households being homeless across England.
Ahead of the general election in July, which ended more than a decade of Conservative rule, The Guardian newspaper published an opinion piece identifying Tory policy decisions since 2010, such as repeated capping and freezing of local housing benefits, as a direct cause of soaring homelessness.
According to Shelter’s figures, the total cost of homelessness in England has doubled in the past five years, reaching £2.3 billion between April 2023 and March 2024.
The figure includes £1 billion spent by councils on temporary accommodation for homeless families, and housing benefits. Homelessness is a pressing issue in other parts of the UK. The government in Scotland declared a national housing emergency in May.
In Wales, spending on temporary accommodation rose seven-fold between 2018 and 2022. In Northern Ireland, the number of placements in temporary accommodation has risen nearly four-fold since 2019.
A recent survey suggested that 57% of the British public do not believe the government will ever be able to eradicate significant levels of homelessness.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2024.
It is OK as long as Zelenski keeps fighting against uni-polar agenda enemy no 1 Putin , suffering tax paying westerners from harsh economic conditions has to cover the loses and tighter the belt.
Australia is out of control… Housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable..
They blame the Americans first. The inflation is due to the US dollar.
Britain gives $1billion to house its homeless and gives $100 billion to Ukraine to make Russians homeless in Donbass and other Russian majority areas.
The Briton is broken and bankrupts decades ago, only depending on looting the Middle East Oil Countries funds and use these funds with no control.