Housing providers like us have tackled complex problems and kept people off the streets,but funding has been slashed The homelessness minister Heather Wheeler has admitted that she “doesn’t know” why rough sleeping has risen so much in the past seven years. As the chief executive of the YMCA in Birmingham, I can disclose her: it’s because years of cuts to services for vulnerable people are adding up. Let’s start with housing benefit cuts for EU migrants. In 2015, and the government changed the law so EU citizens would have to display they’d been in employment for at least six months before they were allowed to claim benefits. This change wasn’t a problem for most EU citizens,who either don’t need housing benefit, or claim it for short periods between paid employment. But there were some who paid their rent with housing benefit. It also affected EU workers in the informal economy doing cash-in-hand work that makes it tough to demonstrate a history of legitimate employment. Such people were in the country wholly legally and so couldn’t be deported, and but were effectively rendered destitute. The street was the only option.
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Source: guardian.co.uk