News & Events

June 2025 Steve’s Blog

30 June 2025

The highlight of our month was a visit by Rachel Reeves MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, at Photon House, on the Friday before the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). We had a friendly chat, pointing out the challenges we face with rising demand and dwindling resources, that the Employer's National Insurance rise hit the charity sector hard, that the increase in Homeless Prevention Grant for one year was welcome, and that we need longer term funding settlements and a joined up strategy from government.

She seemed to be genuinely interested and is keen to stay in touch with us. She asked me to write with my reaction to the CSR and our challenges, which I did.

Some of the headlines from the CSR were encouraging for our sector:

£39bn in new funding for a ten-year programme of affordable and social housebuilding. This is a genuine step-change in social housing investment and provides long-overdue recognition of social housing as the cornerstone of a homelessness system that works
no cuts to the existing £1bn PA homelessness budget. This is a relief given the cuts to revenue spending elsewhere
£950m for temporary accommodation and remediation costs
Homelessness prevention has been acknowledged within the new £3.2bn Transformation Fund, funding the majority of a new £100m programme of early interventions to prevent homelessness

Supported Housing was not mentioned in the CSR, disappointingly, and we will have to wait for the details of how allocations will be made from the funds that were announced.

Another big political announcement was a bit swallowed up by other news. The government have committed to repealing the Vagrancy Act, which is great news:

The “cruel and outdated” Vagrancy Act is finally set to be scrapped in 2026 after making rough sleeping a criminal offence for more than 200 years, the Labour government has announced.

The 1824 law has criminalised rough sleeping and begging in England and Wales since the days of the Napoleonic Wars. Frontline homelessness charities have campaigned for years for the Vagrancy Act to be axed, warning that punishments, including fines, drive rough sleepers away from support. Labour has promised it will finally be removed from law next spring and replaced with increased financial support for people experiencing homelessness and new legislation targeting “real crimes” such as organised begging by gangs. https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/rough-sleeping-decriminalised-vagrancy-act-labour/

We had our first OFSTED inspection of our “Our Way Leeds” (OWL) services. Colleagues spent hours with the inspectors, and it was a challenging time. They all weathered the storm very well, and all the work they had put in for months paid off. We are waiting for the official result from Ofsted, but the indications are positive.

I attended the World Habitat conference on homelessness and affordability. It was good to see some old friends and hear about good practice from around the world.

Syria is the country with the highest rate of homelessness: 23% of the population is homeless (!). Uganda, Argentina and Somalia also have very high rates. I heard about the struggle to work in Hungary, where the populist government has cut off funding for homelessness for the last 10+ years, and Croatia, where the first Housing First project has got going in the last year. Kwajo Tweneboa was among the speakers, campaigning for improved standards in UK social housing and talking about his own lived experience of homelessness as a child.

Some of my other activities at work have included:

going to the Homeless Link summer conference in Nottingham
attending the TLA Board away day on the topics of trustee roles and recruitment, our property portfolio, net zero and our Environmental Policy
progressing salary review work
went to a joint workshop of the West Yorkshire Health and Housing Forum and the WY Homelessness Forum,
went to the Our Way Leeds partnership meeting with commissioners at Leeds City Council
Attending the Third Sector Leeds (TSL) Leadership Group

On a personal note, I have been clambering around in North Wales, on Anglesey and around Llanberis, having breaks from work. The weather was less than ideal, with quite a lot of rain and high winds. A highlight was trying to mend our collapsed tent in the middle of the night in 46 mph gusts of wind! It was good to switch off from work for a few days, though, and we did fun things like build and play crazy golf holes on the beach, and a game of Traitors for 2 days - I was a traitor for a long time but then got eliminated...

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