What's changing for people facing homelessness — and what we're doing about it.

This month we held our community fundraising evening — a night of live performances, with food included as part of the ticket price, in support of our work relieving homelessness and hardship here in Leicester.

Between ticket sales and cash donations from everyone who came along, the evening raised £15,600. That's a genuinely significant sum for a charity our size, and every penny of it goes straight toward the three things we exist to do: emergency relief for people in sudden hardship, practical housing support, and grants to housing associations doing similar work.

We're enormously grateful to everyone who bought a ticket, performed, or simply turned up on the night. Small charities like ours run almost entirely on this kind of community goodwill, and evenings like this make a real, direct difference to the people we support.

If you missed it and would still like to contribute, you can donate here — or get in touch if you'd like to help us plan the next one.

The Renters' Rights Bill completed its remaining Commons stages on 14 January, was introduced to the House of Lords the next day, and had its second reading there on 4 February. At its heart is a manifesto commitment to end Section 21 "no-fault" evictions — still the single most common route into homelessness we see, since a landlord can end a tenancy with no reason given and comparatively little notice.

Peers debating the bill were broadly supportive of ending no-fault evictions, though several pointed out that the deeper issue is a shortage of genuinely affordable homes to rent, and that rent inflation itself remains largely untouched by the bill.

Earlier in the month, the Public Accounts Committee published a report warning that the homelessness crisis is placing unsustainable pressure on local authorities' finances — a theme that's going to run right through this series over the coming months, as councils try to hold things together while reform slowly works its way through Parliament.

Government figures covering the quarter to the end of March 2025 make sobering reading: 169,050 children were living in temporary accommodation in England, a new record high. The number of households in the most unsuitable forms of emergency housing — nightly-paid B&Bs and hostels — rose by almost a quarter (23%) to 69,410.

Between January and March, 83,450 households approached their council for homelessness help and were found eligible for support, actually a 6% fall on the same quarter the year before — a reminder that these figures move in different directions depending on which part of the system you're looking at.

What's consistent, though, is the picture in temporary accommodation itself: more children, in worse conditions, for longer. It's exactly the kind of instability that makes it harder for a family to hold down work, keep children in the same school, or simply feel settled.

Every April, Local Housing Allowance rates are supposed to be reviewed against actual local rents. This April, the government chose not to raise them, meaning LHA stays frozen at 2024 levels — based on rents from October 2022 to September 2023 — until at least April 2026.

It sounds technical, but the effect is direct: as real rents keep climbing and the benefit that's supposed to help cover them doesn't move, the gap between what people receive and what they actually owe their landlord keeps widening. That gap is one of the more preventable drivers of arrears, eviction, and ultimately homelessness.

Ministers, when questioned on the impact in Parliament this month, acknowledged the causes of homelessness are complex and interlinked, and said departments were continuing to assess LHA's effect on both homelessness and local government finances. Campaigners weren't reassured — they've been warning for years that repeated freezes have broken the link between the benefit and the actual cost of renting.

Committee stage for the Renters' Rights Bill ran across eleven separate sittings in the House of Lords between 22 April and 15 May — a sign of just how contested some of the detail has become, even where the broad principle is widely supported.

The Local Government Association reiterated its support for ending Section 21 and assured shorthold tenancies, noting that the end of a private tenancy remains the single most common reason a household ends up at risk of homelessness. It also flagged something easy to overlook: because Section 21 is a "no reason needed" eviction, it's currently very hard for councils to know why a tenancy actually ended. Removing it should, in theory, give both local and central government much better information to act on.

Behind the scenes, though, there's a structural tension worth naming plainly: a disproportionate number of peers in the House of Lords are themselves landlords, and several amendments debated this month would, if they'd stuck, have weakened tenant protections rather than strengthened them.

This month's Spending Review carried genuinely significant news for the housing sector: a £39 billion commitment over ten years to a new Social and Affordable Homes Programme, with at least 60% of the roughly 300,000 homes it delivers earmarked specifically for social rent.

It's the kind of long-term supply commitment that housing and homelessness charities have been calling for consistently — the honest truth is that reforming evictions and topping up housing benefit can only do so much if there simply aren't enough genuinely affordable homes to move people into.

It won't be felt immediately, though. Building 300,000 homes over a decade is a long runway, and by this point in the year an estimated 172,420 children were already living in temporary accommodation — the gap this programme is meant to eventually close is a wide one right now.

Third reading in the House of Lords — traditionally a "tidying up" stage rather than a major battleground — took place on 21 July, moving the Renters' Rights Bill another step closer to becoming law after well over a year of parliamentary progress.

The pressure on frontline services hasn't let up while Parliament has worked through it, though. Citizens Advice reported helping more than 12,900 private renters with homelessness-related issues so far this year — up 10% on the same period two years ago — with a quarter of those needing further referral to food banks or other charitable support because low LHA rates simply weren't covering their rent.

It's a useful reminder that legislative progress and lived reality move on different timelines. The bill getting closer to law is genuinely good news; it doesn't change what's happening to people this week.

Not every update in this series has been good news, and this month's was a genuine concern. Shelter flagged that several revisions made in the House of Lords, if they survive into the final bill, would actually weaken tenant protections rather than strengthen them — most notably raising the bar for councils to fine rule-breaking landlords to "beyond reasonable doubt," a criminal standard of proof that's much harder to meet than the civil standard used elsewhere.

Charities also highlighted a striking figure: in the year since the last general election, an estimated 25,000 households had been threatened with homelessness because of a Section 21 eviction — and that number was still rising, even as the bill meant to end the practice moved through Parliament.

The bill now returns to the Commons, where the government has both a working majority and a clear manifesto commitment to resist these Lords amendments. Whether it does so will matter a great deal to renters watching this closely.

MPs debated the House of Lords' amendments to the Renters' Rights Bill on 8 September, with much of the discussion returning to that "beyond reasonable doubt" enforcement threshold flagged last month, alongside separate concerns raised about the state of services family accommodation.

Away from Parliament, the government also confirmed just how much the current system is costing: councils in England spent £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation in the 2024/25 financial year — a 25% increase in a single year, and more than double what was spent five years ago. A third of that, £844 million, went on emergency B&Bs and hostels: the most expensive and least suitable form of temporary housing there is.

It's a genuinely useful number to hold onto. Every pound spent housing people in a hostel because there's nowhere better available is a pound that reform, if it works, could eventually redirect toward actually preventing homelessness in the first place.

After close to two years working its way through Parliament, the Renters' Rights Bill received Royal Assent on 27 October and became the Renters' Rights Act 2025 — the most significant reform to private renting in England since 1988.

Its headline commitment is the end of Section 21 "no-fault" evictions, the single most common route into homelessness we've referenced throughout this series. But Royal Assent isn't the same as the law actually changing overnight: the Act's provisions are set to roll out in stages through 2026 rather than all at once, and government has said more detail on the timeline is coming next month.

It's a genuine milestone worth marking. Whether it delivers the change people are hoping for now depends entirely on how well — and how quickly — it's actually implemented.

The government published its implementation roadmap for the Renters' Rights Act on 13 November, confirming that the core tenancy reforms — including the actual abolition of Section 21 — won't take effect until May 2026, with a new landlord database and ombudsman service following later in the year.

The same month brought a much harder read: the Homelessness Monitor 2025, an independent study from Crisis and Heriot-Watt University, found rough sleeping across England had risen by 20% over the past year, with around 330,000 households assessed by local authorities as homeless or at risk of homelessness. Evictions from Home Office asylum accommodation were also up 37%.

At the Autumn Budget this month, the Chancellor also confirmed the government's intention to scrap the two-child benefit limit from April 2026 — a policy change we'll be following closely in the months ahead, given how directly it affects the larger families we see struggling most with rent affordability.

In mid-December, the government published A National Plan to End Homelessness — its long-term strategy for England, backed by £3.5 billion of investment. The plan's stated goal is for homelessness to become "rare, brief and non-recurring," with an emphasis on shifting resources from crisis response toward prevention.

Among the commitments: increasing the supply of temporary accommodation, improving its quality, and strengthening protections for people living in it. The plan also proposes new legal protections for care leavers, who face particularly high risks of homelessness as they age out of the care system.

The response from the sector has been cautiously positive. Major homelessness charities, including St Mungo's and Centrepoint, broadly welcomed the strategy's ambition, while stressing that sustained funding and follow-through will be what actually determines whether it succeeds.

New investigatory powers for councils to inspect rented properties and enforce housing standards came into effect at the end of this month too — a smaller but practical step that should make it easier to hold bad landlords to account.

The Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill was introduced to Parliament this month, following the Chancellor's Autumn Budget pledge to scrap the policy from April 2026. The two-child limit, introduced in 2017, currently restricts the Universal Credit child element to a family's first two children — regardless of how many they actually have.

It's a policy that's long been linked to child poverty and housing instability. Families with three or more children losing out on roughly £3,650 a year per additional child puts real pressure on rent affordability, and can be the tipping point into arrears or eviction. Around 483,000 families across the UK have been affected by the limit.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates the change could mean roughly 400,000 fewer children in poverty this year, though it's also cautioned that without further reform, progress on poverty more broadly is likely to stall. It's a genuinely significant policy shift for the families we work with — and one worth watching as it moves through Parliament.

Official government figures released this month make for hard reading. An estimated 4,793 people were sleeping rough on a single night across England last autumn — the highest number since records began in 2010, and a rise for the fourth year running. It's also higher than the previous peak recorded back in 2017.

The same release showed a record 134,760 households living in temporary accommodation, up 7% on the year before, including nearly 176,000 children. London and the South East account for around 43% of all rough sleeping nationally, though the steepest year-on-year rise was in the North East, up 31%.

The government responded with a further £50 million in funding for councils and frontline homelessness services, on top of the National Plan announced in December. Charities including St Mungo's called the figures a stark reminder of the scale of the crisis, warning that behind every statistic is a person whose stability and health are being seriously affected.

It's exactly why the kind of direct, local support we provide matters — national strategy takes time to filter down, but people need help now.

Beyond the annual autumn snapshot that made headlines in February, the government also publishes quarterly rough sleeping data throughout the year — and this quarter's figures, covering January to March 2026, add useful detail to the bigger picture.

An estimated 3,461 people were sleeping rough on a single night in March 2026, with around 7,541 people sleeping rough at some point across the month — a small decrease on the same period last year, though rough sleeping on any single night remains at a record high for this time of year historically.

The data also breaks down who's affected: 77% of people sleeping rough with a known nationality were from the UK, and just 4% were under 25. It's a reminder that the popular narrative around who ends up on the streets doesn't always match the reality on the ground.

Quarterly data like this matters because it's more sensitive to short-term changes than the single annual count — useful for spotting whether policy interventions are actually starting to bite.

From 6 April 2026, the two-child limit on Universal Credit officially ended. Families with three or more children can now receive the child element — worth around £293 a month per additional child — for every child in the household, not just the first two.

For most affected families, this should mean a meaningful and immediate boost to household income, which matters directly for rent affordability and arrears prevention. It's worth flagging one caveat, though: the separate benefit cap remains in place, meaning an estimated 70,000 out-of-work families may not see the full increase, since the cap limits total benefit income regardless of household size.

Government modelling suggests the change could lift around 600,000 people out of poverty by 2030, with roughly two million children seeing higher household income. It's one of the more consequential welfare changes in years for the families we work alongside, and a genuinely positive one — fifteen months after we first flagged the campaign to scrap it in this very series.

1 May 2026 was the "big bang" date for the Renters' Rights Act: Section 21 no-fault evictions were formally abolished, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England — new and existing — automatically converted into an open-ended assured periodic tenancy.

In practice, this means landlords can no longer end a tenancy without giving a legal reason. Instead, they now have to rely on the amended Section 8 grounds — things like rent arrears, intent to sell, or moving into the property themselves — and go through the courts to do it.

This is the single change we've been most hopeful about across the whole of this rolling series, since it was first introduced to Parliament well over a year ago. Section 21 has been one of the most consistent routes into homelessness we've seen in our own casework: a tenancy ending abruptly, with little notice and no wrongdoing on the tenant's part. Removing that route entirely, if it holds up in practice, should meaningfully reduce a whole category of preventable homelessness over time.

The reform isn't finished — a new database for landlords and a dedicated ombudsman service are both due later in 2026 — but this was the change that actually touches people's lives most directly.

Not every story this month was about legislation. Reporting this month highlighted a growing and uncomfortable practice: London councils, including Croydon and Enfield, contracting private companies to relocate homeless families out of the capital and into far cheaper areas — in one reported case, a vulnerable woman and her two children moved 260 miles away to County Durham.

It's an understandable response to genuinely difficult arithmetic. Council spending on temporary accommodation has risen 125% in real terms since 2019/20, and from this financial year, a new ringfence on the Homelessness Prevention Grant means councils have less flexibility to use that funding for temporary accommodation costs. Something has to give, and often it's proximity to school, healthcare, and support networks that gets sacrificed first.

It's a useful, if uncomfortable, reminder that housing policy decisions made nationally land very differently depending on where you live — and that "solving" homelessness on a spreadsheet doesn't always mean solving it for the actual person involved.

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first major speech in office this month to pledge to end long-term rough sleeping "at the earliest opportunity," announcing a £340 million plan aimed at bringing 1,200 homes and intensive support to at least 3,000 people as an opening phase.

It's a striking way to open a premiership, and homelessness charities have broadly welcomed the ambition while pointing out, fairly, that similar pledges have been made before without delivering lasting change. A recent analysis from IPPR North warned that without sustained government action, homelessness in England could still rise by around 50,000 people by the end of the decade.

Closer to home, this remains the pattern we see week to week: suitable housing is genuinely hard to deliver, particularly across the Midlands, where local authorities are under growing pressure to place people quickly without compromising on whether the accommodation is actually appropriate for their circumstances.

Eighteen months on from our first fundraiser, and the national picture is still shifting month by month. What hasn't changed is our day-to-day work here in Leicester — and we'll keep tracking what this new pledge means in practice over the months ahead.