 A charity has released analysis showing that youth homelessness has increased by 40% over the past five years. Using data from local authorities centrepoint found that in 2019, 121,000 young people presented as homeless or as at acute risk of homelessness. That figure is up from 86,000 in 2016. Even more worrying, this figure won't take into account any extra homelessness which may have been caused by lockdowns. That means they could go even higher centrepoint here have said they have seen a third more call to their helpline since the start of the pandemic. So that's an indication of what the next round of statistics could tell us. In terms of who this impacts, separate figures from the Guardian show that black people are disproportionately affected by homelessness. So as you can see here, and this is using data from the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Guardian find that 10% of people entitled to homelessness relief are black, despite black people making up only 3.5% of the UK population. In London, the figure is 30%. That's despite black people in the capital making up only 12.5% of the population. The chief executive of centrepoint, that's Sayi Obakin, says he expects these figures to worsen again, once cuts to universal credit feed into the system, something that comes up on so many topics in this show. Ash, they're very sobering statistics, what do you make of them? This is again the way in which different areas of policy actually reflect lots of other areas of policy. So particularly when it comes to housing and homelessness, well obviously this is going to reflect the over representation of young people in the private rental sector, which is the single biggest source of homelessness. Most people are made homeless after having been in the private rental sector, and then 11% of them simply have been made homeless because the landlord wanted to re-let the property or sell it. You've also got I think this race angle which reflects lots of things. One is discrimination against people of colour in the private rental sector. So there have been studies which have been done and also undercover stings which have shown that if you are a person of colour or you've got a name which is red as being somebody who isn't white, then it is much harder for you to find a letting's agent or a landlord who wants you to sign their lease. So that's going to have knock on effects down the line, particularly then when you add to that the over representation of people of colour in precarious forms of employment, the over representation of people of colour in prison systems, then coming out of it is much harder to find a home. All of these things then add up to inequalities and over representations of particular groups, young people, people of colour amongst the homeless population. And I think there's also a third aspect of this which is disability and mental health issues which I don't think have been mentioned so far. So you see a disproportionate number of people who are made homeless, yes, because they have been placed in the kind of financial precarity which we know disproportionately impacts people with disabilities, people with mental health issues, but also both of these things are then exacerbated by the experience of homelessness. So yeah, it's no surprise to me that those figures make for particularly grim reading and that what they show us is that our society makes certain classes of people more vulnerable than others. I mean landlords just don't exist. It is like feudalism because it is in my life I work 60% of my hours and I get to keep the money and I work 40% of my hours which goes directly to my landlord. So that is how feudalism worked. Apparently it was less than 40%. I think it was maybe a third of your time you had to toil the land of your, again, your landlord and you would toil your own land two thirds of the time. Now I have to toil for my landlord even more than the serfs did. Now I mean my quality of life is probably significantly better than your average medieval serf, but still the injustice of it is it's shocking, isn't it? I'm especially annoyed now Ash because I'm after paying them 40% of everything they get to kick me out because they're selling the house. What can be done? Well look what can be done is that one I think that we need to make being a landlord so prohibitively expensive that nobody wants to do it. So you do just have to discourage the ownership of second homes. Homes should be lived in by the people who are paying for it and landlords aren't the ones paying for it. We're the ones paying for it. We're paying off their mortgage. And so that's the first thing is that actually tax them till the pips squeak. Second thing is you've seen this in Berlin as well. You have had legislation come into essentially expropriate properties from the biggest commercial landlords. So it is something which can be done. It's happened in other countries. There's no reason why we can't do it here. And then the third thing is while people do need the availability of cheap rental properties, they used to be called council housing. Now in the video, I don't take a starry eyed view of council housing because you had things like the Ronan Point disaster, which were the result of, you know, criminally poor building standards when it came to some of these concrete prefabs. However, that wasn't the case for all council housing, particularly in London. You still see examples of very well made, very beautiful, very pleasant council built homes. And that's something which I think could very much happen again if there was political will to do it. It is an investment by the state. They own that asset and they're able to set rents at social levels. It's expropriate, it's tax, it's build.