Cities want €100m more a year to shelter homeless people
The four big cities and the G40 Stedennetwerk say municipalities fall tens of millions of euros short each year on sheltering homeless people, a legal duty, as parliament debates homelessness on Wednesday.
i
Illustrative photo: BakkeBaarend / CC BY-SA 4.0
The four big cities and the G40 Stedennetwerk have called on the central government to provide at least €100m extra every year to shelter homeless people. They say so in a letter to the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of parliament.
Municipalities need more financial help from the central government, the cities write, because they now fall tens of millions of euros short every year. Sheltering homeless people is a legal duty for municipalities. The Tweede Kamer debates possible solutions to homelessness on Wednesday.
“Homelessness has been a growing problem for years,” the municipality of The Hague (Den Haag) writes. Despite that, it says, the contribution to a solution “has not kept pace”.
A home is the main way out of homelessness, The Hague says. But action plans to provide homes will take years to deliver results, so the municipalities want more financial support to provide shelter in the meantime.
More on cabinet and parliament
See more of NLnow in Google: add it as a preferred source