422 million at the end of sleeping on the street. Ealing Southall MP asks Prime Minister about people without entitlement to benefits

Deirdre Costigan returned to Parliament and on the first day of the session asked Andy Burnham how the national programme against rough sleeping would reach Southall and whether it would include people with no recourse to public funds. On the first day after the parliamentary holiday, Labour MP from Ealing Southall, Deirdre Costigan, published a recording from the House of Commons and a short communiqué. She wrote that she kept her promise: she asked Prime Minister Andy Burnham how his investment, in a post she gave £422 million, would end rough sleeping and help Ealing Southall. The most important was the second sentence: what support will the program give to people sleeping on the streets of the commune, who have no recourse to public funds, i.e. they formally do not have the right to public funds. This is not a general question about homelessness in England. It's a question about Southall. What the Prime Minister announced and why the difference in the amount Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on July 20, 2026. That same day, on the steps of Downing Street, he announced that the government's first order would be to end long-term rough sleeping at the earliest opportunity. Added to this was £340m from the Department of Housing's uninvolved budgets. On 18 August, the government added another £102m and announced a national spike so that by Christmas every person sleeping on the street in England would be offered an offer to get off the pavement: emergency accommodation plus support. The official package from both announcements is about £442m for three years. Some go on the road in winter, some for more than a thousand permanent apartments and intensive help, including mental health and addictions. Costigan's post features 422 million, not 442 million. The difference does not change the sense of the matter. The issue is whether the national program sees Ealing Southall at all and whether it sees those whose law cuts off from typical housing assistance. Why Ealing isn't just a coincidence CHAIN data for 2025/26 shows that 12,938 people were seen on the street in London. In Ealing 642, it is the fourth highest in the capital, after Westminster, Camden and the City of London, and the highest in West London. The numbers of the council are of a similar order. In 2023/24, the municipality recorded 710 people seen at least once on the street, in 2024/25 it was 723. The council boasts that in the winter of 2024/25, thanks to the outreach and short overnight stays, it pulled about 70 people off the pavement and that Ealing entered the top of the communes in England in terms of rough sleeping reduction. This hates scale: during the same period, more than 3,000 households lived in temporary premises, including more than 4,400 children. The specificity of Southall is different than in central London. Costigan described it in the House of Commons as early as October 23, 2024: at night, people lie under the canopy of Quality Foods, in cartons and torn sleeping bags. Many are older men, often from India and Punjab, who have worked here for years in construction or in catering. They rented a room. Then illness, loss of job, breakup of the relationship. When they went for help, they heard that they did not have the right immigration status. Then an abbreviation appears, which in Westminster sounds technical, and under the Southall store means cobblestone: NRPF. What does NRPF mean and why the entire No recourse to public funds program is an immigration condition. A person subject to immigration control, with limited leave to remain, without status or with part of a visa, cannot take most of the benefits: Universal Credit, housing benefit, housing assistance of the council in the usual mode. Cannot legally rent multiple units. Often cannot work legally. The board and charities are not completely helpless. They can give you a meal, a shower, immigration advice, a Severe Weather frost bed, sometimes Care Act support if someone is sick enough to qualify for social care. In the long run, however, they are not allowed to finance a permanent roof with public money. The hands are bound by law, not by the lack of goodwill of an official. In Ealing, this percentage is exceptionally high. In the rough sleeping strategy, the municipality wrote that up to two thirds of people on the street do not have the right to public funds or the status is unclear. Newer council announcements say about a third. Still, this is hundreds of people whose completion of rough sleeping by Christmas will not be solved by purchasing the hostel from the grant alone, if the grant is to go only to eligible people. That's why Costigan's question is precise. Burnham's program promises 1,200 apartments and support for at least 3,000 long-serving people on the street. If the criterion is classic eligibility for housing benefit, Southall will get an advertisement, not a bed. What's already happening on the spot and what it doesn't take care of On the ground, St Mungo