Was the scheme to rehouse the homeless during the Covid lockdown another big Tory dud?
Robert Jenrick: when it comes to doing what’s right, it seems he’ll avoid every opportunity that comes his way.
It seems homeless people really are invisible – to the media, at least.
The Tories told us they were putting people who sleep on the streets into temporary accommodation – with a scheme called “Everyone In”.
Except it turns out that everyone wasn’t in.
Even by the Tories’ own estimation they only managed to bring 90 per cent of then-existing homeless people out of the open air and behind closed doors.
And that estimation comes from Robert Jenrick. What are his words worth?
Not a lot, it seems:
In June, the Office for Statistics Regulation criticised ministers for a lack of transparency by quoting figures without publishing supporting data.
Homelessness charity Streetlink is reporting that reports of people living on the streets rocketed by 36 per cent, year on year, for the period between April and June 2020.
Notifications were also higher than the previous quarter – January to March – which is unusual as they usually rise during the winter months.
According to the relevant charities, it seems the Covid crisis – and the Tory government’s lame response – has led to an entirely new cohort of people becoming homeless as the services and facilities on which they relied closed down.
People who did not have access to public funds – and some of us made loud noises about this at the time – were particularly hard-hit, especially people from foreign countries.
So the jingoistic Tories found yet another way to hammer Johnny Foreigner.
The information puts us in a nightmare scenario of escalation, with the Tories silent on calls to extend the ban on evictions, that ends on August 23.
So it seems the plan is to dump half the population in the gutter while we’re all looking the other way.
Source: Reports of rough sleeping in UK rose sharply during lockdown | Society | The Guardian
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