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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Mrs Heather Wheeler)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this important debate. This is my first opportunity to reply as a Minister; I am delighted that it is to such an old friend of mine.
Let me start with the issue of begging and associated antisocial behaviours. As all hon. Members will be aware, begging is an offence under the Vagrancy Act 1824, and enforcement decisions are a matter for chief constables and for police and crime commissioners. Local authorities and police are equipped with a wide range of enforcement powers to combat issues arising from begging. Particularly flexible are the powers contained in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which has given local authorities a range of tools, from criminal behaviour orders to public space protection orders. To support local authorities and police in making such orders under the Act, the Government have recently published updated guidance on their use and particularly on their application to vulnerable groups. It is very important that those powers are applied at a local level to meet local circumstances, in order to ensure that authorities can provide a targeted approach to tackle the issues they face in their areas, such as those that my hon. Friend outlined.
As hon. Members will appreciate, there are many reasons why people beg. To tackle the issue effectively, it is important that local authorities apply appropriate interventions that seek to address the underlying causes. To achieve that, as my hon. Friend said, it is very important that agencies across the communities come together, including police, local authorities and support services. I am absolutely delighted to hear of the work of Harbour Place, which sounds like a very interesting charity. I understand that there are a number of positive examples of well established multi-agency teams working with other local public and voluntary sector services to ensure that appropriate support and intervention is put in place to prevent anti-social behaviour in the long term.
Where people are sleeping rough, it is vital that they receive the support they need so that they are able to move away from damaging street lifestyles and into accommodation. As my hon. Friend set out, the Government are taking a number of important actions to meet our objectives of halving rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminating it altogether by 2027. To achieve those objectives, we have embarked on an ambitious programme to reform our response that places prevention right at its heart.
I am delighted that, thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and colleagues across Government, the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017—the most ambitious legislative reform in decades—will be implemented in April. It will fundamentally transform the culture of homelessness service delivery and ensure that local authorities, public bodies and the third sector work together to actively prevent homelessness for all those at risk, irrespective of priority need, intentional homelessness or local connection. It will also require local authorities to work with those in need to develop personalised housing plans tailored to focus on the needs and circumstances of the individual. Those can include actions for other support services that are best suited to assist the individual.
Local authorities are clearly best placed to make decisions about how to meet the unique needs and requirements of their residents. Homelessness is a complex issue and each area is different, so it is right that local authorities have the tools and flexibilities to develop a tailored and holistic solution that works for their communities.
By placing duties on local authorities to intervene at earlier stages to prevent homelessness in their areas, the 2017 Act will ensure that more people will get the help they need before they face a homelessness crisis. To ensure that local authorities have the requisite resource in place to deliver the new duties under the Act successfully, we will provide them with an additional £72.7 million in “new burdens” funding, and I sincerely hope that my hon. Friend makes sure that North East Lincolnshire Council applies for an appropriate amount from that fund.
To support local authorities even further, we have established a homelessness advice and support team, drawn from those with expertise on this issue within local authorities and the homelessness sector. These advisers have been providing targeted challenge and support to help local authorities to prepare for the 2017 Act, and to improve their practice and performance, where appropriate, across all areas of homelessness work. So far, representatives from over 250 of England’s 326 local housing authorities have attended homelessness advice and support team events, and met the team.
We have allocated more than £1 billion to prevent and reduce homelessness and rough sleeping through to 2020. That funding will assist people to get the help they need and prevent homelessness and rough sleeping from happening in the first place. As part of this package, we have protected £315 million of core funding to local authorities to prevent homelessness. We have also provided local authorities with £402 million in flexible homelessness support grant funding, which local authorities can use to prevent and tackle homelessness in their area strategically.
That funding sits alongside our wider funding on homelessness prevention of £197 million, and specifically our homelessness prevention programme, which includes a £20 million rough sleeping fund. That fund is supporting 48 projects to prevent or reduce rough sleeping in innovative ways, by strengthening and building partnerships with agencies that play a crucial role in helping those who are at risk of sleeping rough, or already sleeping rough, to exit homelessness. With more up-front funding, local authorities will be able to tackle homelessness more proactively, pushing the balance of investment in the future away from crisis intervention and towards prevention.
In the autumn Budget, we made important announcements that will take us even further in achieving our objectives. We announced £28 million of funding to pilot a Housing First approach in three major regions in England. Those pilots will support some of the most entrenched rough sleepers to get off our streets and help them to end their homelessness. Individuals will be provided with stable, affordable accommodation and intensive, wrap-around support. That will help them to recover from complex health issues and to sustain their tenancies. Following completion of the pilots, the impact of the approach will be measured by a rigorous evaluation, which will inform our wider roll-out. Again, if the situation in St Peter’s Avenue in Cleethorpes should continue, I sincerely hope that North East Lincolnshire Council can be encouraged to join in this work after the pilots have finished.
We also know that a challenge for those who are homeless is to access tenancies in the private sector. That is why we announced funding of £20 million for schemes that will enable better access to new private rented sector tenancies or provide support in sustaining tenancies for those who are already homeless or sleeping rough, or at risk of becoming homeless or sleeping rough.
Hon. Members will be aware that tackling homelessness and rough sleeping is a complex challenge. My hon. Friend really gave us the nuts and bolts about that challenge. He has obviously gone into it incredibly deeply in his constituency and his constituents should be very grateful for the amount of time and effort that he has put into this issue, and I am sure that the traders on St Peter’s Avenue will be very grateful to him, too.
Homelessness is a complex challenge and we must adopt a truly holistic approach if we are to achieve our objectives of reducing homelessness and rough sleeping. It is for this reason we have established a rough sleeping and homelessness reduction taskforce, which will oversee the implementation of a cross-Government strategy and drive wider action to reduce homelessness and rough sleeping. The taskforce will bring together Ministers from key Departments with a role in preventing and reducing rough sleeping and homelessness, to establish a fully cross-Government approach to these issues in England.
The remit of the taskforce will be, first, to develop a cross-Government strategy to help rough sleepers, many of whom are entrenched and have complex needs. However, the taskforce will also focus on the wider issues of homelessness prevention and affordable housing. In order to help the taskforce to deliver its objectives, we have put in place a rough sleeping advisory panel, which I will chair and which will comprise key figures from local government, central Government and homelessness charities.
I know that everyone here today will share my firm commitment to reduce homelessness and eliminate rough sleeping. Local authorities and the police are equipped with a range of powers to deal with the issues of begging and the antisocial behaviours that can be associated with it that they experience in their areas, and I encourage multi-agency working to tackle this problem, in particular in my hon. Friend’s constituency of Cleethorpes. If the police in Cleethorpes want to come and talk to us about any more legislation that they think is appropriate, I sincerely hope that, once the pilots that I mentioned are finished, they will consider that these matters are in hand. Nevertheless, our door is always open.
Once again, I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate and Ms Ryan for chairing it. It has given me the opportunity to set out the Government’s approach to tackling these important issues.
Question put and agreed to.