Morning Briefing: highest number of homeless children in a decade this Christmas

In the news

Around 128,000 children will wake up homeless on Christmas Day, The Sun reports. Housing charity Shelter described the figures it gathered as a “national scandal” and the worst in a decade. The Guardian, the Daily Mail and The Mirror also covered the figures.

The Right to Buy in Wales is shortly to be no more after the Welsh Assembly voted yesterday to end the policy. Conservative members of the assembly had attempted to block the ending of the policy but their amendments were voted down. The Scottish Government took the same step last year.

The bill will go forward for Royal Assent to become law, with a ban due to come before May 2021.

Around 139,000 Welsh council and housing association homes have been sold under Right to Buy since 1980.

Since then the social housing stock has fallen by 45% and Labour pledged to end the policy at the 2016 assembly election to ease housing shortages.

And Brighton and Hove Council has been ordered to pay £300 to a single mother who claimed she was evicted from temporary accommodation in an act of revenge after she invited a journalist to look at the poor state of her home.

The council evicted her on the grounds she racially abused a caretaker in the block where she was staying, but the Local Government Ombudsman said there was no evidence this took place.