Street Homelessness

Adam Holloway Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered street homelessness.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I thought I had had the most interesting February recess, but in fact you were sailing through the south Atlantic to South Georgia in rather hazardous circumstances, so I will defer to you.

In the February recess, I wandered into Covent Garden, armed with some cardboard that I had taken from outside a store, and I bedded down for a night under the awning of St Paul’s church. I was there with a very friendly Italian man and a Romanian couple, who were busy checking their phones before going to sleep. My idea was to spend as many days as I could updating myself on the situation of the street homeless in London. I first did that 27 years ago as a much thinner and fitter ex-Army officer, who had only just left the Army and who was trying to become a television reporter. In February, 27 years later, I was doing the same thing as a much fatter Member of Parliament.

I wanted to understand what the Government strategies are to end street homelessness. The Government and the Prime Minister herself have said that they want to eliminate it within 10 years. I wondered how we will do that and whether it will really be possible. I also wanted to look at what effect the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 is likely to have.

I emphasise that, from my perspective, this debate is about street homelessness, which is the obvious problem. There is, however, also the much bigger problem of sofa surfing, which I am not covering at all, although I acknowledge that it is very much there.

Some things have changed, and some things are the same. Things that are the same are the kindness and compassion of members of the public and of the charities dealing with this problem.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. One of the most profoundly moving things I have heard—possibly he heard it too—was after the recent passing of the Rangers and Chelsea footballer Ray Wilkins. On the radio, a moving tribute was paid live on air by a homeless man, who said that, when he was outside a tube station in London, the person who came to him, took him for a hot drink, gave him some money and changed his life was Ray Wilkins. That man said in his tribute that the world might remember Ray Wilkins the footballer, but he will remember the man who saved his life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Adam Holloway]

What a lovely story—I thank the hon. Gentleman.

The other thing that has changed is that the Mayor of London, Westminster City Council, councils across the country and indeed the Government—I do not speak for the Government; I wish I did, but I am just a passed-over Back Bencher—are taking this problem extremely seriously, and I genuinely believe that. The No Second Night Out programme is a good example.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Earlier he mentioned voluntary organisations, and I am sure he agrees that we should pay tribute to those in Coventry, such as the Cyrenians. They are underfunded to a certain extent, which we could have a debate about, but the serious issue is what to do about the problem. We need go less than 100 yards from here, across the road, and every morning we can see someone sleeping rough just under cover where the bookshop is. It is a serious problem, so how do we tackle it? I understand that a private Member’s Bill became law last April—

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions must be brief.

[Adam Holloway]

I have not come across the Cyrenians, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that across the road is an excellent sleep spot.

The No Second Night Out programme is a good example of an early intervention service. It was launched in 2011 by my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), now the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and it aims to ensure that no one, once identified, spends a second night sleeping rough in central London. More recently, Sadiq Khan has gone further and set up the No Nights Sleeping Rough Taskforce, trying to come up with new solutions. The taskforce brings together boroughs, voluntary organisations and central Government.

Apart from the proactiveness of the agencies that are helping, I noticed some other differences. In February 2018 the majority of the people I came across living on the streets were foreign nationals. One evening, at a soup kitchen on the Strand, there were—I will not exaggerate this—certainly 200 people. Various church groups—from Maidenhead, I think—and some Ahmadiyya Muslims, a Sikh group and an evangelical group were helping out. I wandered about while shawls and brand-new trainers were handed out, and I honestly did not hear English being spoken by anyone. I heard east European languages, Arabic and Italian.

The statistics seem to bear out my anecdotal evidence. Information collected by the Combined Homelessness and Information Network—the joint agency of people working with rough sleepers that is run by the excellent charity St Mungo’s—records that, in 2016-17, of the rough sleepers in London for whom nationality information was available, 30% were from central and eastern Europe. The figure for non-UK nationals overall was 52.6%; that does not include those who do not wish to give a nationality, and other sources put the figure nearer 60%, which was certainly my experience.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

I note that the hon. Gentleman mentioned that those figures relate to London. Does he accept that, UK-wide, only 4% of rough sleepers in England are non-European Union nationals and 16% are EU non-UK nationals? Will he join me in thanking those faith groups who go out to serve all communities, regardless of background, and to help people who are in the direst of straits if they are rough sleeping?

[Adam Holloway]

Well, of course—the hon. Lady need not even have bothered asking the latter question, because it is a no-brainer, isn’t it? As for the numbers for the rest of the country, I do not know—I have not looked at them—but they are very interesting. There are many different people with different sets of figures, and I am sure that hers are correct. With the example of the numbers of foreign nationals living homeless in London, we can take our pick, but the CHAIN figure is the most reliable—I do not think that the figure is much more than 60%, but nor do I think it is much less.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Adam Holloway]

I will in a minute, but I have only got to page 3 of my speech, and I have quite a few more pages, some of which will go on to cover voluntary organisations, for example, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned earlier.

[Mr Cunningham]

I have another slant on this.

[Adam Holloway]

Go on.

[Mr Cunningham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. One of the things that the figures mask is that some people are asylum seekers with no status, going from home to home. In fact, on Monday, I met a group of people who are concerned about this. The figure of 4%, or whatever it might be, belies the real figure. Does he agree?

[Adam Holloway]

Yes. As I said at the beginning of my speech, this debate is about street homelessness, and I totally accept that there is a much bigger and much less visible problem of people sofa surfing. Indeed, tomorrow morning I will be seeing an asylum seeker without recourse to public funds who is in exactly the position that the hon. Gentleman is suggesting.

Going on to the reasons for rough sleeping in 1991 and now, the demographic of the people I met on the streets recently is clearly different, because of the foreign nationals, but the reasons for people being there are as sad and complicated as they always were. Once again, I met that seemingly intractable group—the mentally ill, the drug addicted and, in particular, people suffering from mental health issues. Of the what one might describe as “genuinely” street homeless, the overriding majority had some sort of mental health issue, which is compounded by living on the streets and by drug or alcohol addiction.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is being very generous with his time. At the last count in Cheltenham, there were nine rough sleepers, often with complex needs relating to substance misuse or poor mental health, as he indicated. Does he agree that, in those circumstances, there can be no substitute for qualified expert and intensive support, such as that provided by P3 in Cheltenham, and that we should continue to fund that generously?

[Adam Holloway]

I do not know P3, but I am sure that it does great work. I agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come on to that point. How we deal with the mentally ill and the drug addicted, how quickly they have access to support, and how the money goes to the teams on the ground is a very important part.

Some of the street homeless I spoke to were ex-soldiers. One guy had separated from his German wife, whom he had met during our time in the Rhine. She had taken the children back there, and he had been living in a forest in Germany for four months. He had come back to London before trying to head back down to the west country.

There are also ex-offenders, some of whom leave prison with £46 in their pocket, although I did not meet any of them. I am sure that there are also those who lost their homes as a result of benefits sanctions, financial problems or the breakdown of relationships, although despite speaking to many dozens of homeless people, I did not come across any of them. But, of course, there are many of them, and there will be many more in the sofa-surfer sector, which we discussed.

The most common theme was mental illness of some kind. If hon. Members have walked along the road to Victoria station, they will have seen all the people zombified out of their heads on this horrible synthetic cannabis, Spice. I spent a night sleeping there, round the back of the “goods in” entrance to McDonalds. I was looking for a suitable place to sleep, and I found a guy sitting on his own. I wandered up to him and had a bit of chat. He was an alcoholic and was quite lonely, and he was quite nervous of all the Spice guys in the area. He said that I could bed down next to him, which I did. He was 30, from the north of England and quite anxious for company. As we lay there in our sleeping bags—him drinking beer—he told me that he had a flat outside London; in fact, he showed me the keys. But he said that when he is in the flat, he just sits there, getting wasted, and sees nobody. I found it terribly sad that he was so lonely that he preferred to be out on the street. That guy illustrates the complexity of rough sleeping and why the problem persists, even when money is being poured into the system and huge numbers of different services exist.

[Mr Ivan Lewis (Bury South) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and going on to the streets to find out the realities for himself. I have to respond to the point about pouring money into the system. That is absolutely not the case; money is being poured into the system to react to a crisis. The crisis is caused by the breakdown of our public realm—the decimation of frontline public services and the lack of mental health services and drugs and alcohol services. On the one hand, the Government are pouring in ring-fenced money to tackle the problem, but the breakdown of the social fabric of our society—like in the ’80s and ’90s—is the reason we have such a high level of rough sleeping.

[Adam Holloway]

As I said, I would like to be in the Government, but I am not. We will hear from the Minister, who I think will confirm that enormous amounts of money are being poured in. The hon. Gentleman may have a case in terms of sofa surfers, but for the hard-core rough sleepers, I cannot agree with him. I did not come across the sort of people that he characterised. I accept that, in terms of the other group, he may well be correct, but I think that the number of rough sleepers has much to do with the very high levels of eastern European immigration over the last few years. But he is absolutely right that we still have the intractable problem that, whether or not people think we are pouring in money, we are not getting to the people at the very bottom—I will come to them in a minute.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his initiative to put focus on this issue. Over the Easter recess, I did the 6 am shift with police community support officer Steve Hart, in Sheffield, where I met all the people sleeping in doorways and stairwells. None of them were foreign nationals—they were all British—and they all had the sort of complex problems that he describes. I talked to the agencies that worked with them; the reason why those numbers have gone up each year over the last few years is surely that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis) highlighted, starving money from local authorities has minimised not only their ability to deal with the issue, but a key source of funds for the charities in the third sector, which cannot provide the intensive support that people with complex problems need.

[Adam Holloway]

Again, I do not want to be a cop-out, but I will throw that to the Minister. If someone is fit and of sound mind, there are all sorts of services, although not quite 24 hours a day, that make it possible to sleep out. I am 52 years old and I was in the Army; to be honest, sleeping rough in central London is a lot more comfortable than going on exercise when I was in the Army. For those who are mentally ill, drug addicted, old or personality disordered, it is a very different thing.

[Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Adam Holloway]

Can I go on a little bit, unless the hon. Lady is desperate on this point?

[Laura Smith]

I will hold on.

[Adam Holloway]

We have to accept that some people are able to sleep rough in our cities because there are the resources to do so.

[Laura Smith]

Sorry, I cannot hold on. I have been out with homeless people in Crewe and Nantwich, and I do not relate to what the hon. Gentleman is saying at all. Does he agree that an area that needs to be looked at more closely is the high rate of benefit sanctions among homeless service users and the impact of those sanctions?

[Adam Holloway]

As I said at the beginning, this is a debate about street homelessness. I accept that is probably true in that other sector, but I did not come across it, and I am here to talk about my experience, so I do not know.

The hon. Lady said that she does not recognise what I was saying. I am not saying that even a large minority of the homeless are there because there are resources for them. I am trying to say, and I will develop this later, that we will get nowhere in solving the problem and getting to the people who are most needy if we just continue to talk about the homeless and feel sorry for everybody. We have to focus on the people in real need. Come out with me some time, and I will show you.

[Laura Smith]

I go and help the homeless in my community; we have great volunteers who also help them all the time. Thank you, but we are interpreting the issue completely differently. It worries me that you are not recognising some of the real, ingrained problems. I do not think that anybody would choose to sleep rough—I do not buy that.

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman replies, I must make a couple of boring points. First, interventions are getting terribly long—Members must make short, one-sentence interventions. Secondly, any Member who says “you” means me. If Members refer to another Member, they must use the third person—“him” or “her”.

[Adam Holloway]

Thank you, Mr Gray. I can only go by my own experience. I am very keen that we should get to the people who are in real need and that we should start treating people as individuals rather than lumping them all together and suggesting that everyone has the same need. I am trying to be honest; I can only go with my experience of three months back in the ’90s.

[Fiona Onasanya (Peterborough) (Lab)]

rose—

[Adam Holloway]

I really should not allow another intervention, as I am on page four of 15 of my speech, but go on.

[Fiona Onasanya]

As you have just said—

[Fiona Onasanya]

Sorry. As the hon. Gentleman just said, we should not lump all homeless people together; rather, we should look at them individually. Does he agree that, based on his own experience, he is taking a broad-brush approach to all homeless people, and that that is incorrect?

[Adam Holloway]

Well, I am not—actually, I have just turned the page, and I am now on page five of 14. I hope I do not give that impression, because I certainly do not think that. People are on the street for a reason. The problem is not homelessness—although of course that is a problem—but whatever reason someone is on the street. I do not think we disagree at all, but I will get to the hon. Lady’s point.

What was my experience with No Second Night Out? That initiative is based on the idea that once someone is identified, they will not spend a second night out. That happens in cities up and down the country. I reported myself to the StreetLink helpline, and I was woken up at about 2 o’clock in the morning by two outreach workers and asked whether I would like to get in an Addison Lee taxi to go to the No Second Night Out south hub in Hither Green. No Second Night Out has three hubs in London—one in the east, one in the north and one in the south. I had a 3 am interview with a charming, extremely competent and razor-sharp member of staff, and I was then taken into an L-shaped room about a third of the size of this Chamber where about 30 people were camped out on the floor with their own bedding. I squeezed into the one remaining space between a refrigerator and some French windows. I got up the next morning, had a Pret A Manger sandwich and some coffee, and later had an assessment interview. Not wanting to take a valuable place, I made my excuses and left.

To be honest, I was quite relieved when I left. The thought of spending days or weeks sleeping on the floor in a cramped room between the refrigerator and the French windows did not appeal to me much. I can completely see how, for someone able-bodied and of sound mind, it would be much more appealing to sleep under the awning of St Paul’s church in Covent Garden or at the “goods in” entrance round the back of McDonald’s in Victoria, because people have freedom in those places. Also, if I were a drug addict, I do not think I would want to abide by the rules that hostels must have to protect the other people there. But if I had been ill or elderly, I would of course have been grateful for that place on the floor and the plan that St Mungo’s, which operates the initiative, has for people eventually to go on and find housing.

Even if I were Alastair Campbell himself, I would find it hard to put in terms quite how extraordinary the staff of St Mungo’s are. Having made my excuses and left, I was walking down the street, and I had gone round the corner from the hostel when its manager ran down the road after me and said, “No, no, no—you don’t have to do this yourself. Come back and we will sort you out.” It was quite remarkable.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

Prior to becoming an MP, I worked for YMCA Birmingham dealing with homeless young people. Will my hon. Friend join me in celebrating the £2.2 million it was recently granted by the Government to refurbish its 72-bed hostel in Northfield, creating facilities for organisations such as Mind to provide support to formerly homeless people?

[Adam Holloway]

Absolutely. Indeed, I experienced that. For another programme I made some years ago, I pretended to be a homeless mentally ill person in Birmingham. When I was discharged from Queen Elizabeth psychiatric hospital, I went to that very institution and the people there arranged to look after me. That was 30 years ago.

[Laura Smith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Adam Holloway]

Yes, of course—I love the outrage.

[Laura Smith]

I find it unbelievable that the hon. Gentleman would pretend to be a homeless mentally ill person. That just shows how detached he is from the situation. I find that insulting.

[Adam Holloway]

All I can do is suggest that the hon. Lady watches that “World in Action” series from 27 years ago and draws her own conclusions about whether that was a good thing. Let us have a chat about it when she has done that.

Let us carry on with some realities. It is very depressing, after 27 years, to look at streets with the same cohorts of mentally ill and drug-addicted people on them—the people who fall through the cracks in the system. Although the police are more able to intervene when a mentally ill person is on the streets and local authorities have particular duties to those who are vulnerable due to mental illness, the reality is that someone who has had serious psychiatric problems is extremely unlikely to maintain a tenancy or stay off the streets for some time. Indeed, I had not appreciated the churn of people—even when people are engaged, the system does not seem able to keep them for the time that it needs to.

Let us be honest about the correlation between immigration and the rising number of street homeless. It is no surprise to me that, in 2016-17, 1,950 rough sleepers were migrants from Romania, Poland and Lithuania. Obviously, homelessness is a much greater risk when people are far from home and from familial support structures. It became clear to me that some migrants sleep on the streets by choice, preferring to sleep rough than to pay for accommodation. It is a no-brainer that years of high immigration and of successive Governments not building enough houses will have a knock-on effect for people at the bottom of society. Of course that will make rents unaffordable.

[Kirstene Hair (Angus) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Scottish National party Scottish Government have presided over a decade-long slump in Scottish house building? We went from almost 26,000 new builds in 2007 to almost 17,000 in 2016. That is totally unacceptable, and it has fuelled homelessness in Scotland.

[Adam Holloway]

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), will attest to the fact that I am not well enough versed on what is happening in the rest of the country, so I cannot answer that question, but if my hon. Friend says that, I imagine it must be true.

On people from eastern Europe, perhaps it is time to ask ourselves whether it is exploitative to build an economy on cheap labour provided by those who can barely afford to accommodate themselves in our country. We could of course argue that those people are not strictly homeless, because they might have a home back home, but that is their reality when they are here.

My hon. Friend the Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) alluded to the housing crisis. We must face up to the inevitable impact of that crisis, and of the related issues of lack of supply and affordability, on homelessness. It is estimated that between 2010 and 2016, population growth, including net international migration, was around 1.58 million. The number of rough sleepers has increased by 169% since 2010. In 2016-17, the housing stock in the UK increased by around 217,000 residential dwellings—an increase of 15% from the previous year, but short of the estimated quarter of a million-odd new homes required to keep up with household formation.

It is not difficult to see that the sums just do not add up, including under this Government. Although the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 strengthens the duties of local authorities to provide advisory services to people threatened with homelessness and encourages pre-emptive action where house building has not kept up with population increases, it is absurd to think that that will not impact the people at the bottom of society who are often the most unseen—not those on the streets but those on sofas.

We must address the fact that homelessness impacts men and women in different ways. Rough sleepers are overwhelmingly men. During my recent stint on the streets, I saw only a handful of women whom I unscientifically judged to be street homeless—the big giveaway is people carrying bags and suitcases. CHAIN data for 2016-17 shows that only 15% of rough sleepers in London were women. Part of the issue must be that those who care for young children—typically women—are rightly prioritised in the allocation of social housing. However, somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that men who live on the streets were once part of a family unit.

[Laura Smith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Adam Holloway]

I would love to give way again; the hon. Lady is so informed.

[Laura Smith]

Again, I am astounded by the misogynistic comment that it should be women who look after the children. I know that is a different issue to the debate, but I cannot let it go by.

[Adam Holloway]

I will read what I said again: part of the issue must be that the allocation of housing priorities goes to those who care for young children, who are typically women, and rightly so.

[Laura Smith]

“And rightly so”!

[Adam Holloway]

Yes, absolutely. It is right for housing priority to go to people who look after children, and typically they are women. Again, I am just stating the reality. If it is different, the hon. Lady should tell us.

Let us move on. We must recognise the particular challenge of mental health issues that affect men, and the way that men who battle for many years with the perceived stigma of mental health problems can be particularly susceptible to a sudden crisis that can lead to homelessness. I also learned about the ways homelessness affects women. Some women in London ride the bus for 24 hours a day to stay off the streets, and some go from place to place in return for a bed to sleep in.

We must also address the issue of how people’s generosity can sometimes be as much part of the problem as the solution. The man I met near Victoria station spent the night drinking beer bought with £30 that kind members of the public had come up and given him that evening. St Mungo’s staff told me of a client who had abused drugs for many years and had a leg amputated as a result, but who finally managed to get clean. This man told them that if he had not been given money by the public for so long he would have sought help much sooner. Begging is part of the problem—an able-bodied person can make quite a lot of money from begging on the streets of London. Generosity by members of the public is a factor in this; generosity can be enabling and mask those in real need.

[Fiona Onasanya]

Will the hon. Gentleman please clarify whether he seeks to assert that people would rather be homeless and hope for public generosity than in a place where they can have their own income?

[Adam Holloway]

No, and rather like the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith), the hon. Lady is not listening. I am not saying that; I am saying that if someone is a drug addict, the generosity of members of the public can enable their addiction. I just gave the example of a guy who was on the streets for years and had a leg amputated, and who now believes that if the public had not been so generous, he might have sought help much sooner.

[Fiona Onasanya]

I recall the hon. Gentleman said that people can make money from being on the street—I am paraphrasing, but will he please clarify that point?

[Adam Holloway]

I will change that sentence. A person can make money in order to buy drugs to feed their addiction—that point was pretty clear in what I said.

An added complexity is that there seems to be a perception among some of those involved in helping the homeless that in order to access services someone needs to sleep on the streets. Surely we should be helping people earlier. The endless churn of people entering the system—many of whom could and should have been helped earlier—makes the job of organisations who are trying to care for those vulnerable, and trapped, people even more difficult.

[Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about the trapped nature of many homeless people. I recently visited a homeless shelter in Glasgow and I discovered a vicious cycle for people who might get a job, but they cannot then secure it because they do not have a bank account, and they cannot get a bank account because they do not have a job or permanent address. That puts people into a spiral of despair, which may well lead to them having addiction problems—no wonder they have addiction problems given the cycle of despair they are in.

[Adam Holloway]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s overall point. I think the business of not having an address has been dealt with by quite a lot of charities, but it is clearly much harder to hold down a job for someone who also has the complexity of sorting themselves out every night and living on the streets. I definitely agree with that.

How should we tackle the problem? From my experience of sleeping rough in 2018, I would say that our priority must be to ensure that we do not make the mistake of lumping all rough sleepers together. That stops us recognising people’s problems, and often means that we not go far enough to tackle the underlying reasons for rough sleeping. We also need urgently to address how mental health problems experienced by rough sleepers are identified and treated. Since my recent experience on the streets, a link has been made between the scaling back of mental health services and a rise in homelessness. An outreach worker, and former rough sleeper, told me only yesterday how he literally begged a doctor to get him some sort of treatment when no mental health services were available to help him.

Outreach workers also speak about their frustration at the lack of emergency mental health assessments, and the desperate need for help at the right time and in the right place. A supervisor at the No Second Night Out hub in London said that sometimes when someone arrives who is obviously suffering from a mental illness, the charity has to hold that severely mentally ill person in the hostel for up to three weeks before they get a mental health assessment. During that time the support workers, who are not psychiatric nurses, have to try to contain the situation, which is hugely challenging. If the person is accepted into an NHS mental health unit—that does not always happen, particularly if the person is a drug addict—more often than not, as has been said, they are simply released on to the streets a few weeks later.

Clearly there is an urgent need for mental health teams to be embedded with outreach teams so that they can look at the needs of an individual and refer them without any delay for the treatment they require. Homelessness charities say that there is no point putting enormous amounts of money into general mental health budgets, where it just disappears. The money has to go to the tip of the spear and stay with those people as they go through the system, so that we do not get the churn I have spoken about.

Thankfully, the problem of homelessness seems to be higher up the political agenda than ever before, and the Government’s 2015 Budget increased central Government funding for homelessness programmes to £140-odd million over the following four years. However, it is important that that money is used correctly, at the tip of the spear, focusing on the immediate needs of those on the streets and getting them the help they require, rather than being wasted on intervention that comes too late or does not tackle the root cause of someone’s homelessness.

If we are serious about this issue—I think the Government’s target is potentially over-ambitious—we must see people as individuals not just as homeless people. We must differentiate between different groups and have the courage to look at whether the provision of service is enabling some people to live on the streets, but obscuring others from the help that they need. We must think carefully about whether public kindness is enabling some addiction, and whether by lumping everyone together we are masking those in real need. In this country where we spend gazillions of pounds on a welfare state, we must try to rescue the people at the very bottom of our society from roaming the streets of our cities.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ivan Lewis (Bury South) (Ind)]

It is always a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway) on securing the debate and on his extraordinary account of what he learned.

I care passionately about this issue, as do other Opposition Members, because homelessness is the ultimate symbol of the gross inequality that scars our country and, in my case, the city region of Greater Manchester. We are proud of the renaissance of Manchester, but we cannot celebrate the cranes in the sky, which represent growth and development, while so many people are sleeping in shop doorways before our eyes. This issue also matters to me because in the 1960s, a middle-aged woman was found sleeping in a Manchester park with her young twins. The police officer who found her said, “You can sleep here, madam, but the children can’t,” and they were whisked into care. That middle-aged woman was my grandmother, who was a war widow battling mental health problems, and the twins were my uncle and aunt. The point that I want to make is it that can happen to anyone, and anyone’s family.

Why do we face such a shocking situation—one that in my view is a repeat of the “no such thing as society” ’80s and ’90s? The hon. Member for Gravesham listed the range of people who could be rough sleepers. It is important to underline the need to look at things on an individual-by-individual basis, as there are many causes. Two points I want to make are that, first, many foreign nationals are of course not eligible for public funding, which creates a range of problems for the system and, secondly, that I do not think that the hon. Gentleman meant to say that someone is better off sleeping on the streets than being in the military. That would, I think, be a great indictment.

[Adam Holloway]

I just said that sleeping in central London, if someone is able-bodied, is no worse than being on exercises in the military. It certainly would not be the case for someone who was mentally ill or drug-addicted.

[Mr Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification.

I want to talk about the consequences of the slash-and-burn approach that has decimated public services as a consequence of the Government’s policies. The rhetoric is about a shift to prevention and early intervention, but the reality is that slashing and burning local authorities’ budgets has reduced them to providing their minimum legal responsibilities. Prevention and early intervention go out of the window. As for voluntary organisations, we no longer hear the term “the big society”. The reason why that was killed—that it was dropped and never mentioned—was that at the same time as the Government were talking about the growth in the importance of voluntary organisations, they were slashing the funding that they depended on. It is nonsense to talk about the big society. The alleged commitment to localism has proved to be complete nonsense. If you were running a business, Mr Gray, and you had a 50% cut in your budget over four years, you would go bankrupt or would be likely to go out of business. That is what is happening to local authorities under all political direction throughout the country. We are paying a heavy price for that.

I welcome the ring-fenced money that the Government have made available to tackle the issues, especially in Greater Manchester, but the irony is that the money, which is not adequate, is necessary only because of the impact of their social policy failures and cuts. It is right, therefore, that in a debate of this kind we do not say, “Take the politics out of it.” There is a rough sleeping epidemic as a direct consequence of political decisions. However, it is incumbent on an Opposition to offer creative and positive solutions, and Greater Manchester deserves tremendous credit for the innovative approach it is taking under the leadership of its Mayor, Andy Burnham, working with the 10 local authorities, the voluntary sector, faith groups and the private sector. The Mayor’s ambitious and morally right commitment is to end rough sleeping by 2020—seven years ahead of the Government commitment. They are committed only to ensuring that no one has to sleep on the streets of this country by 2027. I argue that that is a massive lack of ambition, in view of the humanitarian crisis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Adam Holloway]

I thank the Minister and the shadow Minister for their speeches, and the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) for his excellent intervention. It was fascinating to hear about the grandmother of the hon. Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis). Thank God we have moved on some way from that. I would love to hear more about Stan at some point.

We need to think about the realities of homelessness and see it for what it is, rather than how we would like to characterise it. Homelessness is of course a problem, but it is only a symptom. We will get nowhere if we do not get to the underlying problems these people face. As we have seen from this debate, if we cannot discuss this honestly, without the degree of ignorance and prejudice that we saw from a couple of hon. Members, we will get nowhere. We have to treat homeless people as individuals. We have to segment people to some extent, so that we do not mask the problems of the people at the very bottom of our society, who—at the moment and for generations—we have not managed to reach.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered street homelessness.