End Youth Homelessness Cymru Welcomes Publication of Homelessness & Social Allocation Bill

Yesterday (19/05), the Welsh Government brought forward a new Bill in front of the Senedd called ‘The Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation (Wales) Bill’, following their White Paper on Ending Homelessness which was published in October 2023. The new legislation aims to radically transform the ways in which we respond to homelessness in Wales, making it something that is “rare, brief, and unrepeated”. 

End Youth Homelessness Cymru welcomes the publication of this Bill, which has a strong emphasis throughout on creating a system that prevents homelessness, rather than just intervening at the point of crisis. This legislation is a significant step on Wales’ collective journey to ending homelessness. 

We were proud to undertake research with over 20 young people in late-2023/early-2024 in order to find out their views on the proposals as part of our White Paper response, and we are pleased to see that this Bill introduces some new protections that we hope will improve the situation for young people. Given our founding campaign to ban the use of Temporary Accommodation for 16-17-year-old young people, we are particularly pleased to see that this practice would be completely outlawed under the new legislation.

We also welcome the Bill’s increase of the prevention duty to six months from the current 56 days, as well as its new protections to ensure that young people leaving care never come into contact with the homelessness system. Similarly, we were pleased to see the removal of barriers like priority need and intentionality, which in the past could prevent young people from accessing the support they needed. However, the Bill has kept the Local Connection test in place, which young people repeatedly told us in our White Paper response acted as a barrier to accessing services, but that it would not deter them from moving to their chosen area. 

The Bill also introduces a new duty on named public bodies to identify, refer and co-operate, which we strongly support as we believe it will create a more holistic and collaborative system which further embodies homelessness being treated as “everyone’s business”. However, we are disappointed to see that the Education sector has not been included in this new duty. In our White Paper response, we were very clear (as were the young people we spoke to) that placing this duty on schools, colleges, and universities could go a long way to preventing youth homelessness, and we see the decision not to include them as a missed opportunity for early intervention with young people at risk of homelessness. 

We are as committed as ever to ensuring that young people’s voices play a role in shaping housing law in Wales, and we will continue to work with stakeholders and young people to influence this legislation. Welsh Government should spend the coming months continuing their stakeholder engagement and making sure that the Bill is entrenched in Welsh law before the 2026 election.