Ending homelessness in Europe

Homeless Link welcomes the commitments given in the Labour Party and Conservative Party manifestos on homelessness. This is in the same week as the launch of a major campaign, ‘Ending Homelessness’, a new European campaign that sets out goals for ending homelessness as part of the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.

The challenge now is to ensure that these commitments result in real action to end homelessness. We recognise that there has been significant progress in tackling homelessness in the past 20 years and we need to build on this and sustain the focus on tackling homelessness. We hope that the next Government will remain committed to the goal of ending rough sleeping in our country by 2012 but also ensure that attention and action is taken to address the other less visible forms of homelessness. Homeless Link’s manifesto, Ending Homelessness Together, sets out ten steps to end homelessness and these chime closely with the five goals of the European campaign. We hope that the next Government will work with us, the homelessness sector and homeless people to implement these steps. There is European, national and local momentum to ending this social evil and together we can end homelessness for good.

It aims to mainstream five goals:

• no one sleeping rough
• no one living in emergency accommodation for longer than necessary
• no one living in transitional accommodation longer than is required for successful move-on
• no one leaving an institution without viable housing options
• no young people becoming homeless when moving to independent living.

Homeless Lin member, St Mungo’s also backed the campaign as the only English individual charity in the accompanying handbook. The handbook presents examples of good practice to end homelessness.