The lost generation: The government fails to allocate financial support for young rough sleepers

The funding forms part of the government’s £433 million Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme and will create over 2,900 move-on homes. This is a good thing.

Alongside providing mental health support, it will help alleviate the problem of falling bed-spaces in supported housing, one of the reasons it’s harder to get the rising number of homeless young people off the streets over the last decade. By that measure alone, it seems certain to bring us closer to realising the Prime Minister’s ambitious aim to end rough sleeping within this parliament.

However, this sort of funding is coming out of government in such a piecemeal fashion that many are worried it’s preventing the strategic approach needed to ensure that ambition is realised.

We are also concerned that funding won’t find its way to many of the 122,000 young people who faced homelessness last year. While the government’s laser-like focus on rough sleeping is having a real impact in supporting people off the streets, this attention and investment too often seems to leave young people facing homelessness behind.

This is because, for one thing, many of them may not be sleeping rough.

Rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homelessness: for every young person on the streets there are dozens more hidden from view, sofa surfing with friends or family or trapped in risky situations with no safe place to stay.

They should not have to spend a night on the streets to access the support they need – yet this is a perverse incentive this funding risks creating. Our Helpline already hears from young callers almost every week, who say that housing officers are asking them to ‘prove’ their homelessness in that way.

Another consequence of recent funding announcements is that local authorities are better able to support entrenched rough sleepers with multiple needs. This is a major step in the right direction - but fewer young people fit that category and consequently the support available to them seems to remain beyond the budget of many councils.

The government’s ambition to end rough sleeping is important - but ending youth homelessness should be in their sights too; one cannot be achieved without the other.

We know this can be done.

At the start of the pandemic the government stepped up and invested in local services to get everyone in. That was the right call then and it’s the right call now.  Local authorities and charities want to provide age-appropriate accommodation for rough sleepers, but to do that we need more commitment from central government.

Providing sufficient resources is vital – but having a strategy to reduce the growing number of young people facing homelessness could prove even more important still. 

Billy Harding is policy and research manager at Centrepoint