Sadiq Khan plans to end rough sleeping in London by 2030
The mayor of London has said he will end the "trauma" of people who have to be sleeping on the streets before they can access support.He aims to ending rough sleeping by 2030, and has secured £17m in capital funding from central government for his strategy.Sir Sadiq Khan said his new plan of action, would focus on "prevention and increasing the availability of rapid, sustainable routes away from the streets".But Lord Bailey, City Hall Conservatives' housing spokesman, said if the mayor wants to solve homelessness "that involves tackling the housing crisis, which he has failed to do - now Khan needs to force the government to do more".
According to the Trust for London, the number of people sleeping rough in London was almost 12,000 in 2023/24.The charity's figures show a threefold increase in people sleeping on the streets last year than in 2008/09.The government funding will be used to open a new Ending Homelessness Hub, that provide 24/7 support to those most at risk of sleeping rough, and expand the Homes off the Streets programme by refurbishing up to 500 empty homes.The mayor said he will end the current requirement for Londoners to be seen sleeping on the streets before they can access support, and to ensure that those at greatest risk of rough sleeping are helped early, based on their specific needs.Sir Sadiq said: "During my election campaign, I promised to develop a plan to end rough sleeping for good by 2030. "I'm proud to be delivering on that promise. We know the best way to end rough sleeping is to stop it before it starts.""That's why we're putting prevention at the heart of our response."City Hall's rough sleeping budget is £44.8m in 2025/26, a fivefold increase on 2016 when the mayor took office.
Lord Bailey said "press releases full of fake concern and small sums of money to window dress this issue are not enough".He added: "Londoners are suffering on the frontline of this, as are the councils who support them - because Khan and the Labour Party won't do enough."Dealing with rough sleeping is pushing council budgets into the red across the city as the issue becomes worse and worse."Emma Haddad, chief executive of homeless charity St Mungo's, said rough sleeping "is a crisis and should not be a prerequisite for help".She added: "Many of our clients face long-term mental and physical health needs, which can increase the risk of homelessness and make it that much harder for people to get the support they need. "We're also seeing more people locked out of an increasingly unaffordable private rental sector, exacerbated by poor supply of housing and intense demand for it."City Hall said the mayor's new strategy would include specialist services that recognise the needs of particular groups of Londoners, such as those who face additional barriers to accessing services due to high support needs or uncertain immigration status.
'Khan not the first mayor to pledge action'
Analysis by Karl Mercer, BBC London political editorHe may be the latest mayor to promise to end rough sleeping, but Sir Sadiq Khan is not the first.A year after becoming mayor, as he launched his new London Delivery Board, Boris Johnson had declared: "It's scandalous in the 21st century that people have to resort to sleeping on the streets." He promised to end rough sleeping in the capital by the time the Olympics were coming in 2012.He failed, even though he re-visited the issue in his winning 2019 manifesto on the national stage - promising to end rough sleeping by the end of the next parliament. He failed again.Sir Sadiq's pledge is to end it by 2030 - promised during his election-winning campaign last year - but promised against statistics that show the problem is actually on the rise.In 2017/18 - a year after he took over at City Hall - there were around 7,500 rough sleepers annually, prompting the mayor to say a year later that he was "embarrassed and angry" that so many were on the streets.After rising to a then-high of 11,018 in 2020/21, numbers did fall.But they have been on the rise for the past two years - and last year reached an all-time high of 11,993.That, at a time when funding on rough sleepers initiatives has gone up from around £8m to around £45m.Setting a deadline and targets will certainly focus minds on the issue, but rough sleeping is probably just the most visible sign of London's homelessness problem.Last week, London's major housing associations told BBC London they're building 66% fewer affordable homes than they were two years ago - blaming high prices, tougher building regulations and the high cost of maintaining their current homes. A day later the government and the mayor agreed a 22% drop in the target for affordable home building in the capital.The mayor's focus will be on trying to prevent people ending up on the streets in the first place - but he will know delivering many more homes will also be a key part of any sustainable future plan.
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Telegraph
7 hours ago
- Telegraph
Sadiq Khan is killing literary tradition. My great-aunt Virginia Woolf would be horrified
Walking through Westminster I always think of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf's words: 'One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night… a particular hush, or solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.' While Big Ben is now booming out across the city, there isn't much else that my great-aunt would recognise. London has changed quite a bit over the past few years, especially under Sir Sadiq Khan. The first London Mayor to win a third term, Khan has repeatedly pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital, to tackle air pollution, to increase living standards for Londoners, and to end crime on the streets. And yet in Westminster and across central London one is these days confronted by spreading tent encampments, roadworks and rubbish-strewn streets. One-way traffic systems are everywhere, pedestrianised zones, bike lanes weaving in and out of buses, and baffling roundabouts. Certainly devoted readers of Mrs Dalloway – the most popular and most 'London' of her books – many of whom are making the pilgrimage to Bloomsbury this Sunday to mark the novel's centenary, might not recognise the London of its pages. Born in Kensington in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a Londoner to her core, from her earliest years in Hyde Park Gate, the childhood walks around Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond, and visits to the South Kensington museums. As a young woman, London was the epicentre of her social life and creative milieu, as part of the famous Bloomsbury Group. This included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, the adventurous and sometimes scandalous group of artists, writers and political thinkers who (according to Dorothy Parker) had 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'. London was also the inspiration for Virginia's writing and her solace in low moods, as she struggled throughout her adult life with the depression which would eventually overwhelm her. She found escape from her thoughts through walking, or as she called it 'street-haunting'. She walked alone through Westminster, Regent's Park, Bloomsbury, unseen, collecting and absorbing the sights around her, always trying to capture some essence of the city and its people: 'I stop in London sometimes and hear feet shuffling. That's the language, I think; that's the phrase I should like to catch.' Clarissa Dalloway, just like her author, felt that walking in London was 'better than walking in the country', allowing her to escape and lose herself in 'that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'. The novel takes place on a single day, Wednesday 13 June 1923 (and this so-called 'DallowDay' is celebrated every year in the heart of Bloomsbury by wonderfully eccentric Virginia devotees from America and around the world). It follows the heroine from early morning through to the evening of the day on which she is giving a large formal party. Hence those evocative opening lines: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' Virginia adored W1 and the surrounding area, sending Clarissa Dalloway off to buy gloves on Bond Street. In her diary from the early 1920s, Virginia recalls 'a fine spring day. I walked along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight and struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident etc. To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.' So why isn't Sadiq Khan celebrating London's rich literary legacy? Our city streets are steeped in fictional characters, in the sights and sounds of our most famous literary scenes, the haunts and the houses of authors beloved the world over. It's not only Virginia's Bloomsbury and Clarissa Dalloway strolling through Westminster, it's Charles Dickens's Camden Town, Anthony Trollope's Mayfair, Wordsworth 's Westminster Bridge, Robert Louis Stevenson's Hampstead, Arnold Bennett 's Clerkenwell, Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street, to say nothing of George Orwell and Henry James – the list is endless. We should be shouting from the rooftops about London: not in a contrived 'city of culture' way, but to preserve our unique literary heritage and capitalise on it. Instead of the relentless virtue-signalling, the rainbow-painted crossings and the Windrush line, what about an Orlando line, a Pickwick line or a Sherlock Holmes line? Instead of which, taxi drivers taking tourists into these parts of central London are increasingly trapped and gridlocked – as a Bloomsbury cabbie said to me yesterday: 'It's a bloody nightmare.' There are a few blue plaques, but every one of the famous squares could display public information, art and writings from that iconic bohemian set. Children at London schools should be reading and visiting our best London authors, their houses and local streets, getting excited about growing up here. Instead of waging war on drivers with his low traffic neighbourhoods and Ulez schemes, the Mayor could focus on what's already here, he could welcome curious literary pilgrims from around the world and show off everything London has to offer. Instead of the rainbow flags, why not emblazon the images of our greatest London writers on the side of buses? Why not display their writings across the TfL network to inspire commuters and tourists as they travel across our capital city? At London airports too, we could welcome and inspire visitors with a reminder of our truly unique literary heritage. The irony is that Virginia Woolf would be a fabulous woke icon for the Mayor if only he knew it, the most rainbow of all writers, with her rumoured lesbian leanings and her passionate love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Just look at Virginia's gender-bending Orlando (1928) in which the main character transitions sex from male to female, a ground-breaking novel which she admitted to Vita 'is all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.' Instead of slapping a trigger warning QR code on her statue in Tavistock Square, why not celebrate her as a feminist and gay icon, and an experimental literary genius? One hundred years ago Virginia mused on London: 'For heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh… In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge, in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men, in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.'
Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Telegraph
Khan expected to raise Tube fares every year until 2030
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The Guardian
18 hours ago
- The Guardian
Queensland MP calls for return of vagrancy laws to allow police to prosecute homeless people
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