APPG calls for homelessness to be a focus of the NHS 10-year plan

“Fundamentally, government doesn’t know. The most important thing we can do is get an oversight of where that money is being spent, not just in [the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], but across government departments. Once that is done, we’ve called for a new model to be built to fund the homelessness system,” she said.

The government’s inter-ministerial group on homelessness and rough sleeping, announced last year, was an “amazing first step” in joining the dots on the issue, Ms Tottie added. But she said the group should be led by the Treasury.

Sophie Boobis, head of policy and research at Homeless Link, told the meeting the organisation wanted a shift away from a system that was “essentially a crisis-driven, short-term response, to something that is rooted in prevention and long-term support and sustainability”.

“We will never turn off the flow of more people experiencing homelessness until we invest properly in prevention. That needs to be a shared responsibility that is something that is committed to and accountable across government,” she added.

In the same meeting, Aiden Greenall, senior policy officer at Crisis, flagged a forthcoming piece of research by the charity that looks at the links between housing affordability and health inequality.

“We know that, because of high rent inflation, many more people are at risk of homelessness today,” he said.

“I think nothing typifies this issue better than looking at the rising reliance on temporary accommodation with the associated cost to local authorities, but potentially more importantly, on the health impacts of people [who] are living in often unsuitable and non-decent accommodation for months, if not years, particularly young people and families.”

A crucial way of addressing this would be for the government to commit to building 90,000 homes for social rent a year, he added. This figure, widely supported in the sector, is one that Inside Housing has been calling for as part of its ongoing Build Social campaign.

Following the presentations, Paula Barker, co-chair of the APPG, said it would write a letter to Wes Streeting, the health secretary, “to ask that homelessness is included in the 10-year plan”.

Last October, the government announced the development of a 10-year plan to reform the health system.

That announcement kicked off Change NHS, a national conversation designed to gather the views of patients and people working in health and care to shape the organisation’s future. The plan focuses on three shifts: moving care from hospitals to communities, making better use of technology, and preventing sickness, not simply treating it.

Ms Barker added that homelessness can find itself competing against the NHS, education and welfare for funding, but that should not be the case.

“It’s actually the golden thread that runs through every single department. We have to have parliamentarians who think outside the box. We have to push forward to form an invest-to-save model. I think that is really, really important,” she said.

The meeting also referenced recent Inside Housing research that was carried out in partnership with the i newspaper as part of the Reset Homelessness campaign. This revealed the top 20 companies bringing in the most revenue from temporary accommodation contracts. Our research looked at £1.59bn of spending on temporary accommodation by 166 local authorities across the UK in the five years up to March 2024.

Ms Tottie said that represented “enormous amounts of government money” that ultimately “could be better spent supporting people who need it”.