31 January 2024

Matt Falk, Glass Door Homeless Charity’s Head of Operations & Service Development, was interviewed on John Stratford’s show on LBC News.

The interview follows the release of figures showing a significant increase in rough sleeping in London. The Greater London Authority’s latest quarterly Combined Homeless And Information Network (CHAIN) report found that outreach teams had seen 23% more people sleeping rough in London between October and December 2023 than in the same period in 2022.

At the same time, Glass Door announced that since our shelters opened in November, it took just 10 weeks for the number of referrals to the shelter to exceed 1,000. This equates to the rate of referrals being 37% higher than the previous year. You can find out more about these numbers and what they mean here.

Matt was asked about the increase in rough sleeping, the reasons for this increase and what can be done about it. Here are some of his answers:

"There’s a lot of reasons that contribute to homelessness. There’s the cost-of-living crisis which is affecting everyone, but […] the people at the edges of society are most effected by that squeeze. There’s a lack of affordable and quality housing in the capital – that’s not a surprise to anyone – and if you’re at the lower bands of society you’ll have an even harder time accessing that housing. There’s mental health and family and relationship breakdown, those general drivers for homelessness. And there’s also the situation with the Home Office refugee policy, which put people on to the streets with just 7 days notice after receiving their refugee status, so a lot of the people we’re helping at the moment are newly accepted refugees in the UK."

There’s lots of good work happening in the housing sector and the homelessness sector, […] but without more housing available in the UK, we are going to continue to see these problems. There are simply not enough affordable homes in the UK.