We recently received some good news about a bad policy. Back in June, the High Court found that the household benefit cap is unlawful in its current guise. The benefit cap restricts the amount that an out of work household can receive in benefits to £442 a week for families in London and £385 for families elsewhere in the country.

Shelter intervened in the case to raise our concerns that the cap is putting families at risk of homelessness. The … Read more

Renters on a low income breathed a sigh of relief last year when the government said it would not make any additional benefit cuts. But last week’s confirmation of the removal of housing benefit for 18-21-year-olds come April and the rollout of the reduced benefit cap earlier this year, show that there are still many reasons to be worried.

Often overlooked is the fact that all private renters in need of housing benefit (more than 1.2 million households) are also … Read more

In 2015, Wales changed the way it provides support to people threatened with homelessness. This led to a significant reduction in homelessness acceptances. The Homelessness Reduction Bill would make the English homelessness safety net look more like the safety net in Wales. We feel that this would ensure more people get help to try and resolve their homelessness. However, it will not necessarily have the same impact in England as it did in Wales. Here we set out why this … Read more

This post was co-authored by Deborah Garvie and Jenny Pennington

Last week, the Government announced that it would provide an additional £48m to English local authorities to fund the new burdens they will be under as a result of likely changes to homelessness legislation. We are looking into the numbers to see if they stack up. But we have initial concerns about the way the proposed funding will be withdrawn at the point it may be needed most.

As Shelter’s … Read more

Shelter was launched to highlight a homelessness crisis. Now we are in the middle of another one.

Research launched today reveals that over a quarter of a million people in England are homeless. Most of these people are living in temporary accommodation provided by councils. Some are living in homeless hostels and some are sleeping rough. This is a conservative measurement. Many more people are homeless, but hidden.

These people cut your hair, sell you clothes and go to school … Read more

Recently, we’ve been working with Andrea, a woman from Bristol, on our fix renting campaign. As Andrea describes, home is something that you work for. You build it, both through decorating it to make it yours and through getting to know the people and places around it. And from this, you build a life.

For me, home is the start of everything. It gives you more than an address; it gives you a life and a community base. For my … Read more

The National Homelessness Advice Service [NHAS] is a partnership between Shelter and Citizens Advice, funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government. The aim of the service is to enable frontline providers including councils, voluntary agencies and local Citizens Advice Bureaux to deliver good quality housing and homelessness advice, and support the prevention of homelessness where possible.

We asked Vicky Hines, NHAS Partnership Manager – local authorities,  to blog for us about good practice tips around out of area … Read more

On Monday we published new research on the rise in the number of homeless households placed in temporary accommodation outside of their home area. Over the next few days we’ll be discussing the findings in more detail.

As we set out, almost half of homeless households from London are now placed outside their home local authority. But reassuringly, most are moved to areas nearby (for example, in three quarters of cases, a neighbouring borough) and the vast majority are … Read more

You may have heard that some homeless families are being sent from London to other towns and cities. Families coming to their council for help, are not just faced with the horrific situation of losing their home, they’re losing all that is familiar to them too.

But until now, we didn’t know the full picture of what’s happening. It’s true that more and more homeless London households are living in temporary accommodation that is in a different area than where … Read more

A version of this blog first appeared on the Huffington Post

Last weekend’s news was dominated by the political fallout from Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation and by signs of growing political unease around the latest proposed cuts to welfare.

For years we have warned that the government can’t just cut away the housing benefit that five million households rely on before building the hundreds of thousands of genuinely affordable homes we need. But could there be signs that the billions … Read more

The number of homeless families is going up and the number of affordable homes is going down. In order to avoid disaster, councils are stepping in to ensure that Britain’s children don’t sleep on the streets.

But as local authority budgets shrink, the task of keeping children out of the cold becomes that much harder.

Last month we showed how this essential job is being made even more difficult. The benefit cap limits the amount of support that … Read more