00:00Rough sleeping in London has gone up by 29% since last year.
00:04Obviously this is incredibly concerning for us here at Shelter.
00:07The main cause of homelessness is not being able to afford a cost of a home.
00:12Private rents are at record levels and have been going up by huge amounts in recent years.
00:18And we've had decades of failure from central government to invest in the social housing
00:22that we need so that people can truly afford their rents.
00:25On top of this, we've been trapped in a cycle of freezes to housing benefit,
00:29which has made it incredibly difficult for people at the shelter and at the housing
00:32emergency to afford a home.
00:34Mayor Steve Carton has made a commitment to end rough sleeping by 2030.
00:39And we at Shelter really welcome that commitment.
00:41We really need local government to be doing everything that they can to tackle homelessness
00:45in all of its forms.
00:47But the figures that we've seen today show just how difficult it is for local government
00:51to do that on its own, even if it does have a clear plan and an ambition to end rough
00:56sleeping without the kind of investment in social housing from central government that
01:01we need.
01:02That's what's really going to support local government in the fight against homelessness
01:06and in ending the housing emergency for good.
01:09On top of that, we also have the fact that actually not everybody on the streets has
01:13a legal right to emergency accommodation, which makes it very difficult for local authorities
01:19to help them if they are rough sleeping.
01:22What we need to see change is that we need central government to start making the investment
01:27in social rent homes that will finally end homelessness.
01:31We need to build 90,000 social rent homes a year for 10 years across England to finally
01:36start really bringing down the number of people who are becoming homeless.
01:41Social rent is something that is the most important type of housing in tackling homelessness,
01:47because it's where rents are linked to local income.
01:50That means it's realistically the only sort of housing that's ever going to be affordable
01:54for people at risk of homelessness, where other types of what's called affordable housing,
01:59like shared ownership or rents that are 80% of market rent, are really out of reach for
02:06those who might otherwise be rough sleeping.
02:08London is already starting to build more social rent homes, and we need to see central government
02:13really start working with local governments to massively scale up the amount of social
02:18rent homes that we build.
02:20We also need to see everybody who's at risk of the streets actually having a legal right
02:25to accommodation, to make sure that they can at least access emergency accommodation and
02:30don't have to rough sleep.
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