Sadiq Khan: London should get 20% of Affordable Homes Programme top-up

Mr Khan announced £4.8m for a new initiative called Homes off the Streets, which will provide 3,500 supported move-on homes for former rough sleepers. It expands on Clearing House, an earlier programme, with funding coming from the mayor’s £36.3m rough-sleeping budget.

Speaking to Inside Housing at the event, Mr Khan said funding would be set aside for the scheme for the duration of his mayoral term.

“This £4.8m will pay for the Homes Off the Street scheme per annum, so it’s a promise I’m making going forward every year,” he explained.

“These homes aren’t going to be permanent for the rough sleepers. The idea is it’s a place they can stay for a while, until they are sufficiently supported to be able to live independently. Then they go into other housing,” he said.

“That will give people the support so they can go on to get a job, live somewhere with a private landlord and so forth,” he added.

The mayor said he was speaking to councils and housing associations to see if they can provide even more homes for the initiative.

Asked by Inside Housing how the scheme would interface with other support services, such as Housing First, Mr Khan said: “We don’t get that in London… but our response is going to be a homes-led approach with the right wraparound support.”

Ending rough sleeping requires “the right leadership, the right financial support and the right policies”, he said, citing the Renters’ Rights Bill as an important piece of legislation to prevent ‘no-fault’ evictions.

The Labour government has pledged to introduce a cross-government strategy to tackle homelessness. Mr Khan said ministers were “impatient to make progress on this, which is really encouraging”.

He said the Spending Review next spring “will set out what support will be given to the taskforce in terms of any ideas they’ve got that cost money”.

Asked if the Welsh government’s decision to rule out private rent controls had changed his mind about their effectiveness, Mr Khan said: “No. We’re working on building 6,000 homes with rents that are controlled, and we’ll be announcing details of that in due course.”

The mayor also said London will not be able to beat its building target of 80,000 new homes a year set by the government, but it could “get close to that” with the right support. Just 35,000 homes were built in the capital last year.

At the roundtable, the mayor reiterated his pledge to end rough sleeping by 2030, but warned that the scale of the challenge and legacy of the previous government meant “things would get worse” before they got better.

He also launched a call for evidence for a forthcoming rough-sleeping action plan, to be published next year.

A record 11,993 people were recorded sleeping rough in London between April 2023 and March 2024. The figure represents a rise of almost 50% compared with 2016, when Mr Khan became mayor, when 8,096 rough sleepers were recorded.

Mr Khan told attendees that he wanted to offer “tangible hope with a tangible plan”.

Ms Ali said the rough-sleeping figures in London were “staggering”. She said she was working with Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, to fix the asylum system, which has been criticised for exacerbating homelessness.

She repeated her promise that Ms Rayner will chair an “inter-ministerial group” to drive forward the government’s “long-term homelessness strategy”.

“We recognise you need funding certainty,” she told the charities, councils and housing providers in attendance. “You don’t have long to wait, you’ll find out tomorrow” in the Budget, she added.

Latoya Gabbidon, a community member at homelessness charity The Passage, and Lorna Tucker-McGarvey, a filmmaker, both of whom have experience of rough sleeping, also spoke at the event.

Ms Gabbidon warned that “even people accessing support can be forced to sleep rough” in some cases, such as when shelters only run during the winter months.

Ms Tucker-McGarvey called for more funding for therapy and wraparound support for rough sleepers, adding that “the longer you’re on the streets, the more money it’s going to cost you to fix that person”.