World Homelessness Day – Council welcomes £3m funding boost to mission to end homelessness
Manchester City Council has hailed a £3 million World Homelessness Day funding boost.
The substantial extra funding announced by the Government today, Friday 10 October, will help prevent homelessness and help people who have slept rough to build new lives away from the streets.
It represents a top-up to the Council’s existing homelessness funding for the 2025/26 and 2026/27 in recognition of the continuing pressures Manchester and other areas are under.
The Council has already begun to set out plans for how the extra money will be spent to ensure it has the maximum impact.
Around £550,000 of it will be awarded by the Council as grants to organisations in the city’s Voluntary, Community and Faith Sector which are supporting people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Details of these allocations will be announced soon.
Other funding will be used to bolster support to help people in temporary accommodation move on to settled homes.
The funding will also be used to adapt temporary accommodation for people with physical disabilities and other needs, meeting a growing demand for such housing.
180 care leavers who would otherwise be at risk of homelessness will be housed in shared rented homes.
And part of the funding will be used to help resource work to ensure that social housing in the city is available to those who need it most, including a major crackdown on tenancy fraud, back efforts to bring empty homes back into use and help people whose existing social housing is too large for their needs to ‘right size’, freeing up larger homes for families.
Council Leader Cllr Bev Craig said:
“Tackling the homelessness crisis is one of Manchester’s biggest priorities and – working with our community partners across the city – we are turning the tide.
“We welcome today’s extra funding boost from Government which, nationally, adds an extra £84 million to the billion that was committed earlier in the year.
“In Manchester, we are working tirelessly to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place through early help, and to ensure anyone who does become homeless gets the support they need to build new lives in settled homes. It’s good to see that we are bucking the national trend by reducing the number of families in temporary accommodation and effectively eradicating the use of B&Bs for families.
“A big part of our efforts are focussed on building a record number of council, social and genuinely affordable homes for Manchester people. We are also determined to make the best use we can of the 70,000 council and social homes we already have.
“Homelessness remains a big challenge and one we cannot tackle on our own. On World Homelessness Day we pay tribute to the amazing charity and voluntary groups in our city who share our mission to end avoidable homelessness in Manchester.”
