Fiona Colley, Homeless Link's Director of Social Change rounds up what she heard about homelessness from Labour at their conference in Liverpool.
Homeless Link have been at Labour conference this week. Overall we are feeling cautiously optimistic. The big news for the homelessness sector was Keir Starmer’s commitment to house all veterans, young care leavers and victims of domestic abuse. Angela Rayner later confirmed this would include removing the local connection requirement for these groups.
Clearly this is good news in itself and while of course we hope for far more, it augurs well that homelessness and rough sleeping was prioritised by the Prime Minister for his speech.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, also set out a relatively positive tone. She promised to invest for the future and no return to austerity. That said while we expect public spending to rise overall, within that there will be winners and losers - we will need to keep pressing our case and evidencing the value of homelessness services.
Off the main stage I got along to several interesting events, particularly an IPPR panel on tackling poverty with Welfare Minister Sir Stephen Timms and Institute for Government events on public spending with Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones, Treasury Select Committee Chair Dame Meg Hillier and Public Health & Prevention Minster Andrew Gwynne.
At this stage ministers are unable to reveal what the budget and spending review might bring. At the IPPR event I was able to raise the importance of uprating Local Housing Allowance and scrapping or at least increasing the Benefit Cap. We’ll be continuing to press on these and wider welfare reforms when we meet Timms in October.
On the spending review I found the ministers to be thoughtful and interested in proposals from other speakers on aligning spending decisions with the “mission approach” ie long term, cross government and prevention first. This fits well with our asks for a new model for funding homelessness and it’s given me some new ideas for our campaign messaging.
Finally, the highlight for me was our own conference event. We hosted a round table discussion with the Labour Chair and Vice-chairs of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Ending Homelessness, Paula Barker, David Smith and Emily Darlington. We were delighted to bring together a group of sector leaders to highlight both immediate and long term concerns from the sector and talk about how we can work with supportive MPs to influence government. While funding was of course a big issue, partnership working - both national and local - and prevention were also high on the agenda. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with the APPG and thinking about future events to connect members and political leaders.
The sector has been crying out for change and we are eager to see a real difference being made in the homelessness arena. Things seem to be heading in the right direction, but there is a long way to go and so far progress is slower than we’d like. Rest assured we will continue to engage with the government to press them to stay on course and up the pace. The next key moment will be the budget on 30 October.
