John Healey MP: 'Labour successfully tackled rough sleeping – it's time the Tories did too'

Britain is too decent and too well off to put up with people sleeping on our streets. But to our national shame, this Christmas thousands of people will sleep in doorways and on park benches for want of a place to stay.

The number of people without a home is growing fast. In the last six years, those sleeping rough on our streets have doubled, the number of homeless households has risen by almost half to nearly 60,000, and this year well over 100,000 children will be without a home at Christmas. It’s why the Independent’s appeal for a Young and Homeless Helpline is so important.

The hard truth for Tory Ministers is that their decisions have caused this crisis: record low levels of new affordable rented housing, lack of action to help private renters and deep cuts to housing benefit and charity funding.

A Prime Minister who promises on the steps of Downing Street “a country that works for everyone” should not tolerate this. The tragedy is that we know what works because we’ve done it before.

Many may remember the mass homelessness of the 1980s and 1990s, with tent cities in central London. But in one of its biggest forgotten successes the last Labour government reduced rough sleeping by around three-quarters. We set out a comprehensive intervention plan, ground-breaking legislation, fresh investment, and a target to cut rough sleeping by two-thirds – delivered a year early.

Now the time has come to do better and to end rough sleeping so no one need sleep on our streets. That’s the pledge I’m making today on behalf of the Labour Party, and I’ve written to Theresa May challenging her to do the same.

And because these words must be matched by action, Labour’s pledge is backed by a plan to double the capacity of a housing scheme ring-fenced for people with a history of rough sleeping. You can’t help the homeless if you don’t build the homes, and under Labour’s plan 4,000 additional housing association homes would be earmarked for rough sleepers to help them move out of hostels and rebuild their lives, with government funding new social rented homes to replace them.

This first step to tackle the scandal of spiralling homelessness would renew a stalled programme started by a Conservative Housing Minister, Sir George Young, in the early 1990s. Homelessness can and should be a cross-party commitment, with a new national will to solve the growing problem.

So today Labour invites Theresa May to join us and to back our pledge to put an end to homeless people having to sleep rough on the streets.

John Healey MP is the Labour representative for Wentworth and Dearne