This financial year, the Government have provided Crawley Borough Council with over £700,000 to tackle homelessness in our town, with this figure to rise to more than £800,000 in 2019-20.
While funding support is welcome, yesterday I questioned the Local Government Minister in the House of Commons about ensuring those in need of support receive it.
Figures which show that Crawley Borough Council has more than £21 million of reserves – a sum which sits in the top fifth largest among comparable local authorities – and helps put the complaints from their leadership about a supposed lack of financial support into perspective.
It is up to the leadership of housing authorities such as Crawley Borough Council to work constructively with central government and other local authority colleagues in West Sussex to support some of the most vulnerable locally. They need to stop playing party politics with homelessness and start actually acting to tackle this issue with the significant cash they have effectively sitting in the bank as well as the large grants to address this issue they receive from the Government.
Henry Smith MP
Crawley Constituency
House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA
01293 934554/020 7219 7043
henry.smith.mp@parliament.uk
www.henrysmith.info