Mr. Mike Allen:

Yes, but it has gone without doing for too many years to go without saying now. The people at the bottom of the heap - those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless - need a greater share of the existing housing supply, which means people who are slightly less vulnerable will be squeezed. We need to face this situation by giving people the tools to price themselves into what is primarily a private market. This means giving them enough money in rent supplement and improving the delivery of rent supplement to make it less unattractive to landlords, and the tax relief idea is part of it. We also need to ensure the very substantial amount of empty social housing is rapidly made available to people, primarily to this group.

We probably need to consider the local authorities offering housing that is smaller than desired. It is unacceptable to tell a person he or she has to sleep on the street or in an unsuitable shelter for a long period of time because the local authority housing is not good enough, because the person would not make the same choice. Over the next two years, we must do things we would not wish to do in order to make short-term housing available to people. We do not need to build more shelters and create an institutional system based on the assumption that families and individuals will have to live in unsuitable and unsustainable emergency accommodation for years. That is where much of the thinking is going.