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Good afternoon.
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?
Welcome to this week’s Home Front which is coming to you from Sheffield. The answer is: homelessness.
Two years into Homewards, an initiative to end homelessness, Prince William still seems to be doing the government’s job.
Taking part in an on-stage discussion alongside Bartlett and Brown – who both support the project – William updated homelessness experts, support workers and charities from across the country on the progress of his five-year programme, which has the explicit intention of proving that homelessness can be “brief” and “rare”.
“I love the idea that we can create a model that others can copy,” the Prince said.
That model includes early intervention to prevent homelessness in schools by funding support workers to identify children at risk, encouraging employers to give jobs to people who have been homeless and providing housing for people who are homeless in Sheffield.
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.
“You’ve been incredibly generous personally, of course,” Brown said, alluding to the fact that William has added some of his own money to the Homewards pot via his Royal Foundation.
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.
Francesca Albanese, director of policy and social change at Crisis – which is not directly partnered with Homewards – said it was “raising awareness of solutions that are proven to work”.
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.
This week’s visit to Sheffield is timely. Homelessness is currently rising in this country. Bleak statistics from the Combined Homelessness & Information Network (CHAIN) show rough sleeping in London is up by 10 per cent in the last year, with 13,231 people recorded as rough sleeping in the capital.
That’s 63 per cent higher than it was 10 years ago in 2015-16.
Across the country, it’s no better. An estimated 4,667 people slept rough on any given night in autumn 2024. This is a 20 per cent increase on the 2023 estimate and a 164 per cent increase on 2010.
Added to that, the number of people who have been made homeless and subsequently housed in emergency temporary accommodation is spiralling.
In England, there are 126,040 households in temporary accommodation. This includes 164,040 children.
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.
This sort of intervention has worked in Finland, where homelessness has virtually been eradicated.
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.
They’re not wrong. While Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has secured £1bn to support councils in preventing homelessness, it will barely touch the sides. Rayner has also managed to get this Government to commit to scrapping the Vagrancy Act, which criminalised rough sleeping.
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.
This is being thrown into sharp relief by Prince William’s initiative.
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.
If all of this sounds like a member of the Royal Family is doing the work that you’d expect politicians to do, that’s because this is exactly what is happening. And there’s every reason to believe this work could provide a blueprint for a national homelessness strategy given the scale of expertise it has harnessed.
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
As Brown, who has set up his own anti-poverty initiative The Multibank, puts it, “nobody can convene people” like the Royal Family.
When Brown was chancellor and, subsequently prime minister, homelessness fell. It has since risen substantially.
That, Brown concedes, is “an enormous problem” which “needs everybody to come together to sort it.”
“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.
Brown’s optimism is ambitious, perhaps, given the scale of economic headwinds faced by both central government and charities.
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.
Last week, I wrote about how the housing market was still rather stuck. Dozens of readers have since been in touch to share their own stories and frustrations.
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.
The good news is that the number of new mortgages granted for May 2025 was up 3.9 per cent from April. This is the first time mortgage approvals have increased in five months. However, as the expert housing market analyst Neal Hudson notes, the overall figure of 63,032 is still 5 per cent below the 2014-19 average – which tells us the the housing market remains relatively sluggish.
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.
Last week, the Government laid regulations to bring Awaab’s Law (which will force social landlords to fix hazardous homes) and minimum electrical safety standards into effect for the social rented sector from this autumn.
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.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of the subjects mentioned in this week’s Home Front. Or, indeed, anything else.
Please do get in touch by emailing [email protected]
Vicky’s pick
I’ve begun watching Shifty, the new BBC documentary series from legendary filmmaker Adam Curtis. The first episode was made entirely from archive footage of events which took place throughout the 1970s and 80s. There was a particular focus on Margaret Thatcher’s ill-fated policy of “monetarism”.
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.
Devotees of the policy believed that it would work because it had worked in the 19th century. The problem was that the world had changed by the end of the 20th century.
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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