Paula Barker is the Labour MP for Wavertree which is at Liverpool City and on Wednesday she introduced a discussion entitled Youth Homelessness which was contributed for “e-petition 642986, Create a national strategy to end youth homelessness”. The petition was created by Polly Stephens and it ended a few weeks ago in March and it has only achieved just over 15,000 signatures which is sad. As it happened it did obtain 122 signatures in Brighton Pavilion which was one of the largest areas in the UK. The initial comment from Paula was as below.

I beg to move, That this House has considered youth homelessness.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I should declare that my husband is chair of YMCA Together, in Liverpool—it is an unpaid role—and that I am a national patron for YMCA. I pay tribute to the colleagues and friends from various organisations in the homelessness sector who are here today. We have representatives from New Horizon Youth Centre, Centrepoint and Depaul. Thank you for the work that you do and for being here today.

Later on in her first comment, Paula also stated

To obtain such information for England, Centrepoint had to make freedom of information requests for every local authority in the country. That is absolutely ridiculous and shameful. How can the Government properly begin to solve the problem if they do not truly understand the scale of it? That is why charities like Centrepoint—teaming up with the likes of the Albert Kennedy Trust, the YMCA and the fantastic New Horizon Youth Centre, which does so much to help young people in London, and 100 youth organisations—are calling for a national youth homelessness strategy: a plan for the 136,000.

The rest of the session can be obtained from here but sadly there were no other comments about YMCA. The petition is carried out with this text.

In 2021-22, 129,000 young people experiencing homelessness approached their council for help. Yet no one is talking about this and there is no national plan to end this ahead of the General Election. This has to change. We have the power to help so many young people, and absolutely should.

The scale of the issue may be unseen but the solutions are not. Young people’s experiences of homelessness are different from other age groups, so the solutions need to be different too. We know what works. That’s why we are calling for a cross-departmental strategy, prioritising prevention, housing & finances, to end youth homelessness. As a coalition of over 100 youth organisations, we’re calling on government to commit to a strategy to end youth homelessness. We need a #PlanForThe129k.