Homelessness

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Grant Shapps]

One of the problems is that it depends where the figures are taken from. The high point in the number of people in bed and breakfast accommodation was in 2004, which was a long time—seven years—into the previous Administration. We may say that there was a big reduction in, for example, the number of homeless people in temporary accommodation, and that may have been from halfway through the previous Labour Administration, but we must be very careful when trading figures. I am much more concerned about the outcome for people on the ground, and when I talk about people on the ground, I sometimes mean people at the bottom of the pile who are sleeping on the streets.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington and other Labour Members feel some shame that the true size of the cohort of people living on the nation’s streets was buried under the previous system of counting. For example, if someone was sitting upright in a sleeping bag, they were not counted, and they had to be there at a certain time and so on to be counted. One of the first things I did was rip up the system that tried to claim that only 424 people in the country were sleeping rough. Any observer with any knowledge of the system, let alone hon. Members who had spent a lot of time studying homelessness, knew that that was nonsense. I have tried to reveal the true size and scale of the problem and not to bury it or hide it away, but I want to go further.

Reference has been made to the importance of the Supporting People budget. Despite the enormous pressure on reducing budgets to deal with the record deficit, we have kept almost the entire cash amount for the Supporting People programme. In fact, there was a 1% reduction in Supporting People over four years—£6.5 billion. I know that there have been problems on the ground—the hon. Member for Westminster North described them clearly—about the way in which Supporting People money has been spent. I understand that there are challenges when such funding is not ring-fenced—it was not ring-fenced in 2009—and that with other pressures the Supporting People budget has been pressurised on the ground, but it is not that the money has not been going in. Nor is it the case that we have reduced by even a penny support for homelessness. The homelessness budget was £400 million—£100 million a year—for the spending review period, and that has not been reduced.

I do not know whether it has escaped the attention of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington, but during the past year, I took another £70 million, which was not in the spending review and aimed at homelessness, and put it into homelessness programmes, because I passionately believe in maintaining that fantastic homelessness support in this country. When we talk about people being homeless, we generally mean that they have been accepted as being homeless so that they can get a home, but there is a category of single people who do not receive help and support through our system. If a single person—the sort of people we are familiar with from our constituency surgeries—turns up at their local authority, under the rules that have applied until now they would simply be told, “I’m sorry, you are not covered as a preference category. We can do nothing for you.” That is not good enough, and I am sure that other hon. Members agree, so I have made £18.5 million available in the last few months to ensure that tailored advice is available for individuals, in addition to £10 million to Crisis to do the same.

I would dearly like to make the category of single people without dependants a preference category, and that should be the objective of any Government when money allows. I have not only protected all the preference categories that Opposition Members talked about—the work of Louise Casey was praised, and I echo that—I have added to those preference categories and I am trying to go further.

It is crazy that anyone who sees someone sleeping rough in this country must call the local authority; they may or may not get a response, and will not know what has happened afterwards. That is not good enough, so I am setting up a national helpline and a website to ensure that assistance can be brought directly to that individual. It will be run with the assistance of Homeless Link and will be in place by Christmas, and I hope that the whole House will join me in supporting it. When we see somebody sleeping rough, we have a terrible moment of dilemma about whether we should try to assist them directly—even if we do not know whether the money will be used in that person’s best interest—or do something else for them. Now we will be able to use the helpline, and information will be available so that people can see whether that person was helped and in what way. I think that is important.

We have also announced the “no second night out” initiative nationwide. “No second night out” came from the first cross-ministerial working group report, and I hope that Opposition Members will welcome it. The £70 million that I mentioned includes £20 million to back that programme, and it means that nobody in this country who is found sleeping on the street should ever experience a second night in that situation. I slept rough for a night to see what it was like: it is frightening and one feels vulnerable. We do not want any of our citizens to be in that position, and there is no reason for them to be because we have also allocated £42.5 million of funding to the hostel system, to ensure that new and refurbished hostel places are available.

The problem in this country, and particularly in London where we have the excellent combined homelessness and information network—CHAIN—database, is generally not about whether a hostel place is available on any given night, but about finding the individual, connecting them with the hostel, and sometimes persuading them to go into it. “No second night out” and the national reporting line is designed to help deal with that, and I am pleased to say that it has been taken up in Merseyside, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle. It is an excellent, practical example of the way that we are trying to work.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The Minister mentions telephone lines, advice and websites, but people need houses. In particular, those who are homeless, as well as those living in overcrowded and poor conditions, need new social rented homes. I am sorry that I was not in the Chamber for the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). I understand that she mentioned Hammersmith and Fulham—perhaps the worst housing authority in the country—which builds no social rented homes. As a consequence of that, its homelessness strategy, which I commend to the Minister and ask him to read, states that anybody who needs a three-bedroomed house, or bigger, should be discharged to the private rented sector outside the borough. That is contrary to the housing policy of the Government and the Mayor, but is it something that the Minister supports?

[Grant Shapps]

No contribution from the hon. Gentleman would be complete without a reference to his own time as leader of housing in Hammersmith and Fulham. I think, however, that that council has a good record of looking for constructive measures that help to take people off the housing waiting list. For example, it was one of the forerunners in a programme that I launched recently with the Prime Minister to sell 100,000 homes under the right-to-buy programme. Critically, and unlike the previous programme, every penny of that money will be used to build more homes for affordable rent, and that seems to be a great solution. Not only can a family achieve their aspiration of purchasing their own property, but they can do so in the knowledge that somebody else is being taken off the housing waiting list. I have yet to hear whether the Opposition support the return to the right to buy, with the money going towards affordable houses.