Sustainable and affordable housing, mental health support, addiction services, and other infrastructure are urgently needed to address the causes of homelessness, it says.
Pulling these together by working with organisations from across the public sector under a sustainable housing and homeless strategy and giving councils the powers and resources they need to carry out their duties is what will help tackle the crisis - described as the result of national policy failure.
The report was published yesterday after a year-long investigation by the LGiU’s Local Government Homelessness Commission (LGHC), set up in 2018 to explore how councils can prevent homelessness and what support is required from government.
The commission heard from evidence councils as well as charities such as Centrepoint.
Commissioners found that the homelessness problem is much wider than rough sleeping and has called for the narrative to change so it encompasses all forms of homelessness.
For example, the report highlights, for every two people sleeping rough on the streets there are 98 in shelters, temporary accommodation, bed and breakfasts, or moving between “precarious forms of accommodation”.
The LGHC’s investigation also concluded that current funding is spent unproductively and inefficiently. A dysfunctional housing market, an inadequate and badly administered welfare regime, and rising levels of poverty all exacerbate homelessness, it was found.
The report added that without significant strategic funding, the systems in place under the Homelessness Reduction Act (2017), may result in an improved assessment process but will not achieve its ultimate objectives.
As well as a coherent, properly funded housing and homelessness strategy the LGHC has recommended that local government should have the power to vary Local Housing Allowance rates to better reflect local housing market conditions and increase efficient use of public money.
And government should introduce minimum three year tenancies for the private rented sector.
Jonathan Carr-West, chief executive of LGiU, said: “Local authorities are tackling an ever growing homelessness crisis in our communities on a shoestring, with less and less money to do so. The government can no longer expect local government to pick up the pieces.
“Our report calls for greater devolution of powers to build houses, to combine budgets and control and vary the welfare regime so that it better reflects local housing markets.”
Neil Merrick recently looked at the impatct of the Homelessness Reducation Act a year on.
