Sadiq Khan announces £10m investment in rough sleeping services in bid to cut street homelessness
Sadiq Khan announces £10m investment in rough sleeping services in bid to cut street homelessness
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Sir Sadiq Khan has announced a £10m funding package for London’s rough sleeping services in a bid to combat the capital’s crisis of street homelessness. The mayor’s latest funding boost is said to be the largest single investment towards tackling the issue in City Hall’s 25-year history.
The latest data shows that in the three months from July to September of last year, a total of 4,780 people were recorded sleeping rough by outreach teams - an 18 per cent rise on the same period in 2023. It is the latest in a series of records set in the statistics over the last couple of years.
Sir Sadiq promised in his re-election manifesto last year to “end rough sleeping for good by 2030 in partnership with a Labour government”. But only a few months after the election of that Labour government, the mayor warned that rough sleeping would in fact “get worse before it gets better” - a warning he repeated this week.
Sir Sadiq has blamed the worsening crisis on “the legacy of years of underinvestment from the previous Government in housing and support”. His critics argue that he is failing to get a grip of the capital’s housing crisis, and point out that his current Affordable Housing Programme has almost completely stalled.
The new funding will be used to create an expanded network of ‘Ending Homelessness Hubs’. These are safe places for people sleeping rough for the first time to be assessed by professional teams, so that plans can be made to support them off the streets in the long-term.
