Homelessness — House of Commons, 2018-02-27
Topic: Housing
Edward Jonathon Davey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I agree with my hon. Friend. One advantage of devolution is that we can experiment with new ways of doing things, one of which might be better scrutiny of the money I am a bit of a geek on this. I wrote a pamphlet about 15 years ago on it. I did some research and found that the last time the House voted down a request from the Government was 1919, which shows that the House has basically given up its role in scrutinising the Budget properly. When one asks for more information, one ends up going to the National Audit Office, which does some decent work on the figures to help the Public Accounts Committee, which is behind the report we are debating now. I refer hon. Members to the NAO report on homelessness published last September, which shows the full extent of the problem. It shows that local authorities spent £1.148 billion on homelessness in 2015-16—the last year we have figures for—of which £845 million was spent on temporary accommodation and £303 million on prevention, support and advice. There is little detail beyond those big aggregate figures, which do not tell us much about how the money was spent The commentary in the Auditor General’s report is instructive. Paragraph 128 states: "Local authorities fund the cost of homelessness from a number of different sources… The Department does not know how much of each source of funding is used for each component of homelessness services. Without this information, it cannot fully understand the impact that reducing one source of funding will have on the others…the Department does not have the information it needs to predict where a cut in funding will limit a local authority’s ability to meet its duties." What does that mean? The Department does not know. We are not told. Who does know? Who knows where this money is being spent and whether it is being spent in the best way possible? It is time we got our Parliament up to scratch. Then we can talk about parliamentary sovereignty I turn to others parts of the NAO report, which we paid for—it is an expensive and detailed report and we ought to read it properly. It is provided to the House free for Members. I refer them to paragraph 24, which is headed, "Conclusions on Value for Money". It says: "The Department’s recent performance in reducing homelessness therefore cannot be considered value for money." We need to get to grips with this. The money we are spending is probably not enough and the way we are spending it is not very good. We will not tackle this problem until we sort ourselves out The only thing we can find is the trends, and the trends are worrying. We have been spending more in recent years on dealing with the symptoms of the problem—temporary accommodation—but less on prevention. It is great that we have the Homelessness Reduction Act—a brilliant piece of legislation—but we are spending less on prevention, which is not what Parliament wants. Homelessness is a scar on our society. We in this place are elected to do our job properly, to scrutinise the money and tackle this problem. Until we sort out our processes on things such as public expenditure scrutiny, we will never do that job properly.