Homelessness

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I again refer Members to my interests. I am chair of an organisation called Changing Lives, which is based in the north-east but operates in other parts of the country, too. I was Minister for homelessness—among other things, including local government—from 1997 to 2001, which was when we introduced the real drive around rough sleeping and reduced it by more than two-thirds within two years. We had a very clear strategy during that time, where we worked very closely with local authorities and were very successful in reducing rough sleeping. I used to ring up nearly every day and ask not only how many beds were available but how many detox beds, because unless you offered those, you were not going to crack the problem. That is one of the problems today.

In this very short speech in a debate that I congratulate my noble friend on securing, I want to concentrate on the plight of women. Women have been the hidden group in homelessness, and indeed among people with complex needs. In 2007-08, my last job in government was to return to issues such as this as Minister for Social Exclusion. I set up what we called the ACE pilots, looking in a new way at adults with chronic exclusion—I think that is what “ACE” stood for. The question was how to do that in a more holistic way. However, we did not address it in a gender-based way, and that was a mistake. Now, the charity I chair does much more gender-based work, and it is absolutely critical. We run a programme in Gateshead in Newcastle called Fulfilling Lives, a programme funded by the Big Lottery Fund to look at people with complex needs, and we have a significant number of women with whom we are working in this regard. Every one of them has had significant abuse either as a child or as an adult—in most cases, both. That means they do not talk about it in certain settings, so some of our workers who had worked with them for years but had never worked with them in a gender-based way got a real shock when they began to talk much more about the experiences that had brought them to where they were.

That has convinced me that we must take a whole new look at how we do things and how we address these issues. You cannot leave those women in mixed hostels. Indeed, work came out over the summer from a very good organisation called Agenda, which has been brought together from about 60 charities that work with women in this area, looking at and highlighting the number of women who have to sell themselves as sex objects to get accommodation, food and the drugs and the alcohol on which they may well be dependent. This is simply not acceptable and we have to do something about it.

The DCLG Select Committee report last month acknowledged the real issue of women and that we have not been looking at it effectively. I simply say to the Government that this is about issues of mental health, addiction and abuse. Unless we begin to look at this matter much more carefully, especially at how we collect the figures—we do not really know the extent because we do not collect the figures effectively—family life in the next generation will continue to be blighted. With regard to the lives of these women, I say to Ministers: come and have a look at some of the work we are doing. It is remarkable but, my goodness, it is difficult.

The Government have to look at the housing benefit issue and give us the report quickly, because people need assurance that the refuges and hostels that are funded from housing benefit will be exempt in future. We need that assurance quickly. We need more mental health workers to work with these people, and we need gender-based services and approaches. There is much more that I would like to say, but my time is up. I hope we will keep coming back to this, and I hope Ministers will engage with folk like me because we really want to address the issues.