Manchester’s homelessness strategy sets out how the Council and its partners will work together towards ending homelessness – and throws down the gauntlet to national Government to play its part.
The new three-year Homelessness and Rough Sleeping strategy, which covers the period 2024 to 2027 and has just been endorsed by the Council’s Executive, sets out how the Council will work with the voluntary, community and faith sector plus schools, health services and early help services to tackle this pressing issue.
It identifies four priorities: Increasing prevention, reducing rough sleeping, sourcing more suitable and affordable accommodation and supporting better lives. The new strategy places greater emphasis on the impact of homelessness on children and families and aims to ensure that people in Manchester have the right access to information, advice and support to stop them becoming homeless.
The strategy will be supported by a detailed action plan for the Council and the wider Manchester Homelessness Partnership which is currently being developed and will be launched in the new year.
As well as setting out key priorities for Manchester, the strategy recognises that national government holds the most significant power in reducing the causes of homelessness through legislation, policies and funding and contains a number of asks from the city to Westminster and Whitehall. These include:
- Immediately unfreezing Local Housing Allowance, rather than waiting until April as currently planned, to enable more people on benefits to afford to rent homes.
- Bringing forward the long-promised ban on no fault (Section 21) evictions.
- Lifting the existing benefit cap and under-occupancy charge, which reduces the maximum amount of rent people can have covered by Universal Credit or housing benefit
- Funding councils and registered housing providers to build more social rent homes to ease the housing crisis
- Paying Manchester City Council’s Homelessness Prevention Grant in line with the agreed formula. If the Government had funded Manchester’s HPG in line with its published formula, the Council would have had £1.8 million more in 23/24 to tackle the issue.
- Ensure councils are adequately funded to meet local demands and pressures
- The strategy also calls on Greater Manchester Combined Authority - which already adds value to the work of the area’s council through schemes such as A Bed Every Night - to help put the cause to Government to increase the Homelessness Prevention Grant and lead a funded programme to help bring long-term empty properties back into residential use.
Council Leader Cllr Bev Craig said: “Our long-term plans, such as our housing strategy which is delivering 10,000 new affordable homes over a decade, our anti-poverty Strategy and the Making Manchester Fairer drive to tackle inequalities are aligned with tackling some of the underlying challenges which contribute to homelessness.
“This new Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy focuses on the more direct support the city will give to people who are facing, or experiencing, homelessness and will build on that wider work.”
Deputy Council Leader Cllr Joanna Midgley, who leads on homelessness, said: “We are lucky that within the Manchester Homeless Partnership there are incredibly caring and committed organisations who share a desire to help those at risk of, or experiencing, homelessness and a determination to do what we can to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
“This is no easy task in the face of national cost-of-living and housing crises and it requires a collective effort, not just of the sort we’re seeing here in Manchester and working with Greater Manchester Authority, but also from national policymakers.
“For all this we are making progress and are managing to contain numbers of rough sleepers and people in temporary accommodation at a time when other parts of the country are seeing steep increases.
“This new strategy – which has been jointly produced by the Council and the Partnership and will build on what we’ve learned – sets out how we will come together to increase prevention, reduce rough sleeping, increase the availability of suitable accommodation and support people to improve their lives.”
Vicky Leigh, Trust Leader of Greater Manchester Academies Trust, said: “We are pleased to see that the new strategy has an emphasis on prevention - The partnership we have developed has evidenced that schools are in a position to use their trusting relationships with families to ensure housing issues are identified early on. With a willingness to do things differently the Council and the other partner agencies have shown that with some resourcing, this collaborative way of working can be an effective model.
“There is undoubtedly a long way to go, we are facing a national housing crisis, and new cases are referred to us almost daily. However, with the new strategy placing an emphasis on prevention, on children and families and a collaborative way of working across the city, we look forward to contributing to the action plans that will follow and further developing what we believe can be an effective model in responding to the needs of children and families.”