The Labour government is now one month old, the King’s Speech on the 17th of July highlighted Labour’s key areas of focus for their first year in power. Many of the areas highlighted will impact how we will work and we are excited to see some positive commitments:

Cost of Living

We are happy to see a prioritisation of tackling the cost of living crisis. This will hopefully include their pledges of a genuine living wage and the Children's Wellbeing Bill. We hope that a living wage will reduce the number of people in work but still in poverty. We also welcome the focus on child poverty, sadly people who experience poverty as children are more likely to become homeless as adults. A reduction in child poverty today will lower homelessness in the future.

Housing

We are happy to see a focus and commitment to resolving the housing crisis, especially regarding house building. However, we want to see a protected allocation of social and affordable housing as lack of this kind of housing is often a barrier to a stable independent life for the people we help. This focus aligns with our asks for the government to create a better understanding of what affordable housing is and acceptance that social housing is the most demanded type of housing.

Renters Reform Bill

The commitment to continuing to push through the Renters Reform Bill is very welcome as it plans to include greater rights to renters, Awaab’s law, making it illegal to discriminate against people who claim benefits and ending section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions. We see this as a massive opportunity to ensure security and stability to renters. It will prevent people from becoming homeless and ensure that when people leave homelessness and enter the private rented sector they find a fair and stable place to call home.

Devolution 

Labour is looking to promote devolution in local government. We welcome this as it enables more flexibility and power for Greater Manchester Combined Authority to have a local response to homelessness and housing needs. We have seen more promising actions to combat homelessness from GMCA than Westminster with the Good Landlord Charter and the commitment to building 75,000 homes. We hope that devolution will allow more local action to combat homelessness and its causes.

In Conclusion there is a clear focus on housing and importantly affordable housing. It is essential that this new legislation and reform is brought forward as soon as possible to stop the flow of people coming to the streets from an unstable and unsafe private rented sector.

We do however note a very little mention of homelessness and rough sleeping. We believe that addressing the housing crisis will lower homelessness in the long term, however, there needs to be a specific focus on resolving the homelessness crisis. We agree with Crisis’ idea that there needs to be a specific cross-departmental homelessness unit to address homelessness as a cross sector issue including housing, mental health, the care service, health, criminal justice and other departments. We feel that it is not something that we can hope to be resolved purely as a by-product of these new housing-related bills.