Kelly's pledge to fight homelessness
The government wants to help homeless young people find accommodation
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Tuesday, 14, Nov 2006 05:27
Communities secretary Ruth Kelly has unveiled new plans to tackle homelessness amongst young people in England.
The government has allocated a total of £164 million to support measures to provide young people who live on the streets with practical and emotional support, with Ms Kelly pledging to tackle the underlying causes of homelessness.
Speaking earlier today at a London awards ceremony honouring the efforts of organisations and firms that address homelessness, the minister promised to end the use of bed and breakfasts to temporarily house 16 and 17-year-olds without homes.
She also announced that the government would establish supported lodgings schemes and provide mediation services and training for homeless youngsters.
Addressing the Andy Ludlow homelessness awards, Ms Kelly said that she was personally committed to "the fight against homelessness and the causes of it".
The communities secretary added that, along with homelessness charities, the government had created a "vastly-improved safety net" to prevent people from being forced to sleep on the streets, claiming that the number of rough sleepers had fallen by 73 per cent since 1998.
However, she acknowledged that with 94,000 families still remaining in temporary accommodation, there was "much more" to be done to tackle homelessness.
"We cannot slow down, and we are not going to," said Ms Kelly, who admitted the need to provide more social housing, stressing that the government hoped to build 75,000 new homes between 2005-06 and 2007-08.
Responding to the government's new pledge to tackle homelessness, Adam Sampson, chief executive of the charity Shelter, welcomed commitments to end the use of bed and breakfasts for homeless youngsters and plans to provide supported lodgings.
But he warned that 40 years on from the seminal television drama Cathy Come Home, the gritty Ken Loach programme which shocked Britons with its portrayal of a couple's inadvertent slide into poverty, more than one million children were still "trapped" by bad housing or homelessness.
"To lift today's Cathys and their children out of the nightmare of bad housing, the Treasury must commit to funding 20,000 extra social homes each year," Mr Sampson said.
His comments were mirrored by Centrepoint chief executive Anthony Lawton, who said that the charity was concerned that official statistics failed to provide a "true reflection" of the number of homeless young people.
"We are still concerned that there is no true reflection of the scale of youth homelessness with statistics still failing to capture young people who sleep rough, the so called 'hidden' homeless who sofa surf and remain invisible on public transport, and those young people who are not accepted as homeless by local authorities," he said.