Homelessness: Welsh Government policy causing rise in rough sleepers, charity says

• Video report by ITV Wales, National reporter, Rob Osborne

A flagship Welsh Government policy is contributing to a rise in rough sleeping across Wales according to the head of a prominent homelessness charity.

The Renting Homes Act was introduced in 2022 to raise the standard of privately rented accommodation and grant greater protection to tenants against evictions. 

However, ITV Wales’s Sharp End programme has been told that the new policy has had unintended consequences.

Dr Lindsay Cordery Bruce, CEO of the Wallich said: “We have seen landlords leaving the sector. We have heard anecdotal evidence about it for a few months but it’s more recently been confirmed that this is becoming a cause of homelessness, that landlords aren’t able to meet the standards stipulated in the Renting Homes Act so they’ve had to sell up and leave the sector. 

“That accommodation isn’t necessarily available to the people who are at risk of imminent homelessness.”

The act aims to ensure all privately rented accommodation in Wales becomes fit for human habitation.

It also extends the minimum notice period for a no fault eviction from two to six months.

But there are fears the new legislation is putting off some landlords, who are selling up rather than investing to comply with the act, contributing to a shortage of accommodation. 

However the Climate Change Minister, Julie James MS, who has responsibility for homelessness in Wales, has refuted the claims.

She said: “We have no actual empirical evidence of that at all.”

The minister added: “We’ve carefully interrogated that data. There’s a churn in the number of landlords registering but we have no evidence so far anyway that the number of landlords or houses registered has fallen.”

It comes as Welsh Government figures suggest there was a 50% rise in rough sleeping between June 2022 and June 2023.

Homelessness charities warned that as the cost of living crisis continues, they expect the number of people living on our streets to keep increasing.

Julie James MS said the Welsh Government was still committed to its target, made in 2020, to eradicate homelessness in Wales.

She said: “It is a realistic goal. It is a mark of a civilised society that people do not sleep rough on the streets.

“What we really want is to make it rare, brief and unrepeated so where somebody does fall out of housing, we are able to rehouse them in a housing first fashion and wrap the services around them that they need to stay in that house.”

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