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To: government
Call for Emergency Homeless Crisis
Please could you sign the petition, if you agree with the statement of The Mayor of Manchester : Andy Burnham
Recently Parliament voted, rightly, to declare a Climate Change Emergency.
But it left me thinking: when is the declaration of a Homelessness Emergency?
Surely, when hundreds are dying every year on British streets, that is exactly what is needed.
People in doorways is in danger of being accepted as just an inevitable and unchangeable fact of modern life.
This complacency must be challenged.
Just one night out damages health, physical and mental.
This is a humanitarian crisis of our own making – and entirely fixable.
We need to approach it with a new mindset and a new urgency and that’s why I wanted to make this speech today.
I frequently receive letters from young people upset by what they see on the streets where they live.
They cannot understand why it can be allowed to happen. They are crying out for more to be done to help people.
So what do we tell them?
That we can’t afford to solve it?
Or that it is too complicated and we can’t focus on it when we are also dealing with Brexit?
Neither is remotely true and that needs saying.
Frankly, I am fed up of Brexit being used as a convenient excuse for inaction on a range of issues. Issues that can literally be life-and-death for our fellow citizens.
It is outrageous that, almost two years after the Grenfell fire, there are people living in fear in this city every day in buildings with dangerous cladding.
And it is a source of national shame that at least 449 people died last year on British streets for want of a home.
We are in danger of sinking into a national malaise where nothing gets fixed and everything drifts.
It’s time to snap out of it.
So today I call on Parliament to act immediately to end the cladding scandal.
It should also declare a Homelessness Emergency
Recently Parliament voted, rightly, to declare a Climate Change Emergency.
But it left me thinking: when is the declaration of a Homelessness Emergency?
Surely, when hundreds are dying every year on British streets, that is exactly what is needed.
People in doorways is in danger of being accepted as just an inevitable and unchangeable fact of modern life.
This complacency must be challenged.
Just one night out damages health, physical and mental.
This is a humanitarian crisis of our own making – and entirely fixable.
We need to approach it with a new mindset and a new urgency and that’s why I wanted to make this speech today.
I frequently receive letters from young people upset by what they see on the streets where they live.
They cannot understand why it can be allowed to happen. They are crying out for more to be done to help people.
So what do we tell them?
That we can’t afford to solve it?
Or that it is too complicated and we can’t focus on it when we are also dealing with Brexit?
Neither is remotely true and that needs saying.
Frankly, I am fed up of Brexit being used as a convenient excuse for inaction on a range of issues. Issues that can literally be life-and-death for our fellow citizens.
It is outrageous that, almost two years after the Grenfell fire, there are people living in fear in this city every day in buildings with dangerous cladding.
And it is a source of national shame that at least 449 people died last year on British streets for want of a home.
We are in danger of sinking into a national malaise where nothing gets fixed and everything drifts.
It’s time to snap out of it.
So today I call on Parliament to act immediately to end the cladding scandal.
It should also declare a Homelessness Emergency
Why is this important?
People are suffering needlessly and some even dying
