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Here’s a starter for ten: what can get former Labour PM Gordon Brown, businessman and podcaster Steven Bartlett and the Prince of Wales in a room together at the same time?
Two years into Homewards, an initiative to end homelessness, Prince William still seems to be doing the government’s job.
“I love the idea that we can create a model that others can copy,” the Prince said.
It also includes more than £52m worth of funding raised by securing investment from Lloyds Banking Group and other organisations to deliver homes and these prevention projects.
Questions persist about the Royal Family’s finances, about how wealthy they are and how they use that wealth. Nonetheless, the general consensus among homelessness experts is that William has raised the bar for the monarchy’s engagement with social problems with Homewards.
When it was first announced in 2023, the programme was, rightly, deemed to be a profoundly political intervention on a contentious issue from the heir to Britain’s throne.
That’s 63 per cent higher than it was 10 years ago in 2015-16.
Added to that, the number of people who have been made homeless and subsequently housed in emergency temporary accommodation is spiralling.
To be blunt, these figures are a political choice. Experts from across the world agree that homelessness can be solved by taking a “housing first” approach – as Homewards does. That means giving people who don’t have a home a roof over their heads and supporting them to stay in it.
Since Labour stepped into Government, several leading experts on British homelessness have privately told me that they are “disappointed” with Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of ambition to sort things out.
But in terms of a long-term and joined-up strategy, her department has not made the major moves to end homelessness once and for all that stakeholders hoped it would.
Prince William at Meadowhead Secondary School in Sheffield, as part of his visit to the city to mark the two-year anniversary of the Homewards programme (Photo: Danny Lawson/Getty)
Homewards will collect data from its projects which can be made publicly available so that other organisations, including, one presumes, politicians, can learn from it.
Homewards is now operating in six locations across the country: Aberdeen; Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole; Lambeth; Newport; Northern Ireland and Sheffield.
Gordon Brown’s view
When Brown was chancellor and, subsequently prime minister, homelessness fell. It has since risen substantially.
“I see [homelessness] falling,” Brown added, making it clear he thought this would happen as a direct result of Homewards and, he hopes, the new Labour Government’s as-yet-unrevealed child poverty and homelessness strategies.
But, in terms of Homewards’ programmes, they certainly look set to prove that homelessness can be reduced in the areas where they’re being rolled out.
The Bank of England has just released their latest mortgage approvals data. These numbers tell us how many people are actually getting mortgages and, therefore, house sales or remortgages over the line.
Other things to watch
The Renters’ Rights Bill is currently being debated in the Lords and, as you might expect, there is wrangling over what goes in it. Campaigners fear it won’t pass before the summer but, as I understand it, Rayner’s department is confident it will.
The Conservative shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has posted one of his gonzo-style video reports in which he claims that rent inflation has been caused by “mass migration”. It’s true that the arrival of legal migrants in Britain has affected the housing market but the link is more complex than Jenrick makes out. For the full story, do read my Home Front on this subject from last year featuring experts and data.
Please do get in touch by emailing vicky.spratt@theipaper.com
Vicky’s pick
The theory of monetarism is that if you control the money supply, you control inflation. To that end, Thatcher’s government tried to limit the amount of cash knocking around by suppressing wages and raising interest rates. It resulted in factory closures – the fallout of which is the de-industrialisation we’re still grappling with today – and mass unemployment.
Bells were ringing for me as I watched Curtis lay all of this out. Politicians trying out old economic solutions to new economic problems instead of addressing reality? Surely not!
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