Some people were concerned that when Vince became leader, the high priority given to housing and homelessness during Tim Farron’s tenure in the top job might be lost.
Tim famously got involved in politics after watching Cathy Come Home.
However, those concerns were allayed at Christmas when helping homeless people was the focus of his Christmas Message and he has written further about those experiences in his regular column for his local paper, the Richmond and Twickenham Times.
He wrote about the various circumstances that had forced people he had met to sleep on the streets.
One man I talked to, who had lived for ten years under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, had never recovered from violence he experienced at home as a child from an alcoholic mother; he survives by selling “The Big Issue”.
But others have been forced onto the streets by the vagaries of unstable employment, expensive rents and inadequate or unavailable benefits.
I met a young man sleeping out in Covent Garden who was a chef, looking for work, who couldn’t afford the rent until his next job. Another had fallen through the cracks of Universal Credit, forced out of his home by lack of cash for the landlord.
He highlighted the aspects of welfare reform which caused so many problems.
So what can be done?
We need more emergency hostels – currently facing funding cuts which will hit provision by the Salvation Army and the YMCA.
There has to be a rethink of some of the brutal welfare cuts. The warm words about building affordable housing have to be supported by government action.
Spotted in Saturday’s Guardian, an article in a series of celebrity cooking with a difference, where Stephen Bush attempts to cook meals suggested by celebrities and comments on how he got on. It would be fair to say that he wasn’t impressed with Paul Newman…
As noted this morning, Floella Benjamin had an Oral Question in the House of Lords today on the subject of childhood obesity. On a day when Simon Jenkins is suggesting that obesity is a greater threat for millennials than cannabis (add your own comment there, I suggest), the question of the health of our children is a live one.
In a speech tomorrow, Brexit Secretary David Davis will demand that the UK’s regulatory standards are accepted across the EU post-Brexit. He will ask for “mutual recognition” and “close, even-handed co-operation”. 
Following the Government’s publication of its industrial strategy, Norman Lamb, who chairs the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, has 
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