Homelessness

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Best (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, for initiating this important debate. I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a member of an advisory board of the charity Crisis, which does great work to end homelessness.

Homelessness is not only the source of profound misery for those who suffer its consequences but a huge burden on society as a whole. A freedom of information request last month by Inside Housing magazine revealed that around £1 billion was spent last year just on the cost of providing temporary accommodation, mostly in low-grade bed-and-breakfast hotels and poor-quality private rented flats. But direct expenditure on temporary accommodation is a relatively small part of the total spending that homelessness triggers: for health and social care, for example, since ill-health and homelessness go hand in hand, and for the criminal justice system, since those leaving prison with nowhere to go are very likely to reoffend.

I welcome the range of measures that the Government are taking to address this social evil, including their new rough sleeping strategy, their decision to drop potentially disastrous plans for funding specialist supported housing, their overarching objective of increasing the supply of new homes and the renewed interest in social rented housing provision. It is good to see progress, too, in supporting the use of Housing First, which gets people who are long-term homeless and have complex needs off the streets and into a decent home where real help can be offered.

The best approach to homelessness is to prevent it in the first place. I had the privilege of taking the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 through your Lordships’ House. In the medium to longer term, the preventive measures introduced by the Act will reduce homelessness and save money, for sure. But will the resources currently available be insufficient to get hard-pressed local authorities up and running on this agenda? A comment on this from the Minister would be very welcome.

The real interdepartmental problem, as noted by other noble Lords, is the undermining of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s good intentions by the Department for Work and Pensions. The latter’s cuts to help with housing costs are now a direct cause of the growth in homelessness—in particular, its freezing of rental support, or local housing allowances, while rents are rising leads to not only debt arrears and evictions but, on a much wider scale, to landlords ending tenancies for all those who depend on housing benefit help, replacing such tenants with those who can pay the full market rent. I heard on Monday from the National Landlords Association that 91% of the landlords it surveyed in London will not let to anyone on housing benefit, and the NLA’s prediction is that that number is set to get worse. Since there is a chronic shortage of social housing, this simply leaves the poorest with nowhere to go. Sadly, a new report from the Chartered Institute of Housing shows that the Government’s targeted affordability funding, which I had hoped would bridge the rental gap, covers only a few areas and in these places covers only 10% to 30% of the shortfall between the housing benefit and the market rent.

In conclusion, I endorse the plea from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for multiagency interdepartmental action on homelessness. I urge the Government, in particular the MHCLG, to engage with the DWP since it is fuelling the rise in homelessness.