Adrian Sanders
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Mr Adrian Sanders (Torbay) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) on securing this timely debate. We have heard about the growing extent of homelessness and the staggering number of people it affects. The problem reflects some serious structural problems in the housing sector and welfare system. We have also heard about the long-term problems that homelessness can cause. Many are profound, but are not easily quantifiable. However, they are cumulative because homelessness prevents people from finding or staying in work and has a cumulative impact on their health, sometimes provoking them to engage in criminal activity and so on.
Homelessness is part of a wider problem of social exclusion and it is obvious that the solution, especially for harder-to-reach cases, must be comprehensive. It is not just about finding a new home for someone to stay in and leaving them to get on with it. It takes an average of seven years for someone to get to the point of sleeping rough on the streets and it is unrealistic to expect that they can be turned round and brought back to independent life within a matter of months. Helping people in that situation is a long-term commitment.
A huge range of hostels and temporary accommodation schemes have been the bulwark of the response to homelessness, quite often for those who do not fit the priority needs assessments of local authorities, as well as those who do. Many are run by local charities and although they often have generous benefactors, they are reliant on public funding to stay solvent. The Government’s strategy from 2012 was accompanied by promises that funding for such organisations would be protected as much as possible, with more than £400 million being devolved to local authorities and voluntary groups. Unfortunately, that does not lead to steady investment on the ground. More than half of all homelessness services are seeing cuts in their funding, and that will become far worse when local authorities start to make cuts for 2014 onwards.
In my constituency, for example, the elected mayor is consulting on cutting £150,000 from the Leonard Stocks centre. If that goes through, it would make the whole project financially unviable and leave many dozens of vulnerable people every year with nowhere else to go. We urgently need a solution to stop local authorities cutting these services indefinitely. If the Government were to look at a ring fence or upgrading the statutory protections for homeless people, we could see a great improvement and not the impending social disaster that might occur in my constituency and in other places.
Andrea Leadsom
Does my hon. Friend agree that there is also a problem with the SWEP—the severe weather emergency protocol? At a minimum, it only requires local authorities to provide shelter when the temperature reaches zero for three nights in a row. There is a great temptation for local authorities to go to the minimum, which can of course be fatal for many rough sleepers, rather than raising the temperature requirement to a more humane level.
Mr Sanders
That is a very good point. I represent the English riviera, where the temperature does not always drop that far, and there are still problems, even at 3° C.
The history of Torbay’s provision for the roofless is somewhat unique. During Christmas in 1990, representatives of local churches came together to open south Devon’s first direct access hostel for homeless people, in an old warehouse in a backstreet in the centre of Torquay. With the support of Torbay council, which owned the property, it was converted to create a single male dormitory with 12 beds. Initially, there were just two paid members of staff.
The story of the project goes back to 1989 when three local church leaders—Reverend Peter Larkin of St Matthias church, Captain Jim McKnight, the Torquay Salvation Army commander, and the Reverend Mike Blunsum, chaplain at Brunel Manor—began praying about how the local Christian community could respond to a growing number of people sleeping on the streets. In the autumn of 1990, the Reverend Mike Blunsum persuaded the Woodlands House of Prayer Trust to back a homeless project in Torquay with money and resources. Separately, Leonard Stocks, a member of St John’s church in Torquay, was deeply moved one day when he saw a woman begging and holding a sign that read:
“I am homeless please help me.”
He raised the issue at the next meeting of the deanery synod. Leonard was put in contact with the Reverend Blunsum and his committee, which led to a meeting in October 1990 attended by representatives of 40 south Devon churches, together with 20 local agencies, looking for a community response to the homelessness crisis. Those agencies included the citizens advice bureau, Youth With A Mission, social services, the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, Shelter and officers from Torbay council, notable among them the then head of estates, Peter Lucas, himself a committed Christian.
Funding from the Woodlands House of Prayer Trust and a considerable personal contribution from Leonard Stocks saw the hostel open—appropriately—on Christmas eve 1990. The original lease was for just three months, but such was the need that it has never been able to close. The Torbay Churches Homeless Trust decided to merge with the Langley House Trust in 2003 when it became clear that the project could benefit from the robust management systems and training provision that Langley provided. The bedrock of its support, however, remains the Christian community across south Devon.
It may be a long way from the inner cities, but Torbay’s social problems are as acute as anywhere. The Leonard Stocks centre does brilliant work. The hostel was rebuilt only three years ago at a cost of £2.5 million, and staff and volunteers work wonderfully together to get people back into stable accommodation and on the road back to independence. The story is unique, but the facility will be recognised by all hon. Members here, because it is typical of centres around the country. I hope that the Minister will address the suggestions I have made to ring-fence funding or strengthen statutory protections for the homeless, or is there some other remedy to ensure that adequate provision exists for those who find themselves roofless, not only at this time of the year, but at all times of the year?
Nick Boles
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and anticipates a point I want to make. We all accept that the fundamental solution to the underlying problem that produces homelessness and rough sleeping is simple to explain and very difficult to achieve. The solution is, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) mentioned, the consistent delivery of more housing of all kinds, all tenures, all numbers of bedrooms and in all parts of the country; the consistent delivery of more jobs that pay more than the minimum wage and are stable and secure; and a consistent need to do a better job than we have been doing in controlling immigration, particularly by those who do not have the means to support themselves in this country.
In winding up the debate—I am happy to take any particular questions that Members raised to my colleagues in the Department, if there is an answer or a meeting that they would like to have to follow up—I want to reflect on those fundamental solutions and why I believe, for all the difficult decisions that we are making on welfare reform and benefits, that the Government’s strategy is the only strategy that can successfully produce an economy that supports a society that does not allow homelessness to continue at its current rate.
Mr Sanders
Members have mentioned not only homeless hostels under threat, but women’s refuges. I often wonder why there is not a refuge or a hostel in every local authority area. Often, those refuges or hostels serve people from other local authority areas. Is there some mechanism that Government could use to ensure that the appropriate funding goes to refuges and hostels that serve wider areas, so that the burden does not fall just on that local authority?
Nick Boles
If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will come back to him in writing on that question, which is important. He also made the important point on the possibility of ring-fencing the homelessness prevention grant. I will allow the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), to respond to that in an intelligent way, rather than make it up on the hoof.