PILC and Migrants’ Rights Network have today written to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government protesting MHCLG’s failure to fund and properly empower local authorities to support rough sleepers and other single homeless people with NRPF through Covid-19.
Local authorities have been informed by MHCLG that they are not required to accommodate homeless people with no recourse to public funds and will not be reimbursed for doing so.
This information, and the ongoing failure to provide self-contained accommodation and support to homeless people with no recourse to public funds, is at odds with the homelessness minister’s clear instruction on 26 March 2020 to ‘bring everyone in’.
Leaving people with NRPF homeless during this crisis is not only a moral and humanitarian failure. It is also incompatible with the need for everybody to stay at home and avoid all unnecessary contact with others, as outlined in the government’s own COVID-19 Guidance on Social Distancing.
Local authorities cannot provide essential shelter and support to ‘those with no recourse to public funds who require [it]’ unless they are properly empowered and funded to do so. It is clear that both the lack of clear published guidance from MHCLG and a lack of adequate, ringfenced funding are contributing to the failure to provide support to all homeless people regardless of immigration status.
The letter calls on Robert Jenrick to:
1) Issue formal guidance to LAs making clear that all homeless people must be supported regardless of immigration status and telling them what powers they should use;
2) Make specific, ring-fenced funding available to all local authorities to cover the actual cost of supporting people with NRPF through this crisis; and
3) Instruct, and fully fund, local authorities to continue to accommodate and meet the subsistence needs of all migrants with NRPF after the ‘lockdown’ ends, pending the urgent abolition of the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) regime.
The letter can be read and downloaded here.
