Homelessness

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray]

Yes, but it is clearly an acknowledgement that the system has not worked for these people. With respect, any move to get rid of the sanctions regime is obviously welcome, but far more needs to be done.

The gap between the LHA paid and the price of supported housing could see many at-risk individuals not receive the support they need from a residential tenancy. A sample study carried out by the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations found that associations in Scotland that provided supported accommodation could lose between £5.2 million and £14.3 million per year. From 2019, the resources for supported accommodation will transfer to the Scottish Government. We are left with great concern about the LHA levels.

The Scottish Government have said that, once they have further details, they will work with their partners to ensure that supported accommodation is put on a secure and sustainable future for the longer term. With the cost of living set to rise, damning forecasts for the UK economy and little cheer in the autumn statement for low-income families, as we heard in the previous debate, it is important that the UK Government realise the damaging impact that austerity is having up and down the country in a variety of ways. This debate has helped to highlight this damage in the crucial area of homelessness. The UK Government should have little to ponder when they consider the growing emergence of people just about managing.

In the time left, I wish to touch briefly on a more general discussion about homelessness, looking at things from the individual’s point of view and understanding both the underlying causes and consequences of homelessness, which can be harder to quantify and address.

Crisis has carried out numerous pieces of important research on the causes and consequences, which have uncovered some particularly depressing statistics. On average, homeless people die at 47 years old, 30 years before the national average of 77. However, poor physical or mental health, along with dependency issues, are problems for the entire homeless population, whether they are sleeping rough on the streets, in hostels or in temporary accommodation.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case, but just to correct that point, it is rough sleepers who are likely to die at the age of 46, which is a tragedy in this day and age. The figures that he is probably looking at relate to the problems of so-called sofa surfers, who are those sleeping with friends or family or anywhere else they can find. The figures for those people, although they are homeless, are not as bad. We need to narrow the focus on to the problems faced by rough sleepers on the streets.

[Neil Gray]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am happy to confirm that, as I have said, homeless people die at 47 years old, and there are issues with life chances whether people are rough sleeping or living in temporary accommodation of varying standards. I think that is a point he will agree with—he is nodding.

Physical disabilities, mental ill health or dependency issues can also trigger, or be part of, a chain of events that lead to someone becoming homeless. Such problems can make it more difficult for people to engage with services and get the help and support they need. Too often services are not set up to respond to the particular, individualised needs of homeless people. Two thirds of homeless people cite drug or alcohol use as a reason for first becoming homeless and those who use drugs are seven times more likely to be homeless than the general population. There are high levels of stress and mental illness associated with being homeless, and it is not uncommon for those traumatised by homelessness to seek solace in drug or alcohol abuse thereafter. Indeed, 27% of homeless people surveyed reported having or recovering from an alcohol problem and 39% reported taking drugs or are recovering from a drug problem.

Although a small percentage of those classed as homeless are sleeping rough on the streets—it is all too high a percentage nevertheless—it is worth remembering the challenges and problems that such a dreadful situation brings and what needs to be done to address it. The 2011 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, “Tackling homelessness and exclusion: Understanding complex lives”, helped to highlight

“extreme forms of homelessness and other support needs,”

and the

“nearly half of service users reporting experience of institutional care, substance misuse, and street activities (such as begging), as well as homelessness.”

In conclusion, the additional challenges and underlying issues mean that while everything must be done by both the Scottish and UK Governments to ensure that a strong safety net is in place for those facing the prospect of homelessness and measures to deal with it, as a society we must also understand and seek to address the underlying causes and consequences that some of those caught up in this horrendous situation face, by ensuring that all individuals can access support from the agencies best placed to assist them.

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[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

Since I was first elected last year, the largest part of my casework has involved housing and homelessness issues. Let me share two cases with the House.

A 28-year-old contacted me, having been homeless for nine years. A lack of help meant that he fell into a life of crime, substance misuse and rough sleeping. Last Christmas, he was attacked and had to have a metal plate in his jaw. This is not the life he wants to live. He wants to make changes and he does not want to be constantly scared.

A mother of an eight-week-old baby contacted me after she was placed in temporary accommodation, two hours away from her local community. She does not know a single person. The accommodation is filthy. It is unhygienic, so she is worried about breastfeeding her baby. The first few months of a child’s life are crucial. She is scared, lonely and disconnected from her support network in south London. These are just two examples of the hundreds and hundreds of cases that I receive.

A homelessness charity in my constituency, Deptford 999 Club, which sees around 50 people in a single day, tells me that it has seen a rise in the number of young vulnerable adults in its winter night shelters. One 23-year-old who was brought up in care was made homeless after a breakdown with his adoptive family. He was sofa-surfing until he ran out of places to stay. He then began sleeping rough. However, Deptford 999 Club managed to house him locally and he now attends university. Thankfully, this is a success story, but, sadly, it is a rarity. Too many people are having to rely on the good will of such charities. We should be doing more.

Deptford 999 Club has had some of its vital resources decommissioned because of the lack of council funding currently available. Fierce cuts in local authority budgets mean that it is forced into making decisions that have detrimental knock-on effects. It is these knock-on effects that have led to the present situation. Lewisham council’s budget has been cut by £121 million since 2010, and funding will be cut again by a quarter by 2020. These cuts are creating holes in our services and simply cost us more in the long term. The number of households in temporary accommodation has gone up by 91% since 2010, yet the supply of affordable lets has decreased by 40% since 2010. These numbers just don’t add up. How on earth are local authorities expected to help those people?

I have looked through the Homelessness Reduction Bill, which I welcome, but I have some concerns about how it will deliver and how local authorities can fund the duties that they will have. They will be required to carry out an assessment of what led to each applicant’s homelessness, but without additional money. Local authorities will be required to secure accommodation for all eligible households threatened with homelessness—again, no additional money.

[Bob Blackman]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful case for her area. Does she not understand that under the new burdens doctrine, because those measures are in the Bill, the Government have to provide funding for those services?

[Vicky Foxcroft]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If the Government were providing that funding, we would welcome it, but we have seen no evidence of that. They are giving councils additional things to do, but not providing extra funding. They are just ring-fencing funding in different areas.

Local authorities will be required to provide those who find themselves homeless with support for a further 56 days to help them secure accommodation, and that—I am going to say it again—is without additional funding. While these things all sound good in principle, I have to ask again how on earth they will be possible when the Government are not properly resourcing local authorities to deliver them.

As we sit here and debate this issue, there are thousands of people across Britain with no roof over their heads, no place to call home, no shelter and no warmth. Rough sleeping has doubled since 2010. Homelessness is up by a third. Things have to change if we want to reverse this trend. We need more affordable housing. We need to tackle spiralling high-cost rents. We need to ensure that local authorities are given the funding they need to be able to tackle these issues.

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[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who made such a powerful case on behalf of her area. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

The causes of homelessness are many and varied. It is all too easy for us to concentrate on one particular issue. I apologise for not being present for the Labour Front-Bench spokesman’s speech—I meant no disrespect; I was in a Committee meeting elsewhere in the Palace, and the timing of this debate meant that I was held up—but the reality is that homelessness peaked under the previous Labour Government at over 300,000 applications in 2003-04. By 2010, because of action taken by the Labour Government, it had dropped dramatically, and it has been rising steadily ever since. It is quite clear that we must address that.

I am very thankful for all the comments about my Homelessness Reduction Bill. I thank everyone who spoke on Second Reading, and those who are serving on the Public Bill Committee as we take it through the House. I look forward to its returning to this place early in 2017, going to the House of Lords and eventually becoming law.

That is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle in solving homelessness. I am clear that we have to deal with the problem of supply above all else, but we need to do other things as well. If we do not build proper affordable housing, quite clearly we will never solve this problem.

[Dr Poulter]

I commend my hon. Friend for his Bill. On the point he has just made, does he agree that a zeal for private home ownership at all costs is at the very root of this problem? We must deal with that if we are to tackle it in the longer term. We need more affordable homes and a genuine housing mix. That is the only way we will help people to avoid homelessness and find a sustainable solution.

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[Bob Blackman]

Clearly we have the problem that Governments of all persuasions, as the Minister rightly said, have failed to build enough housing for almost 40 years. The reality is that the private sector alone will never build enough housing. We have had the announcement of the settlement for London, with £3.15 billion to build 90,000 affordable homes across London over the next three years. That is a great settlement. It is now incumbent on everyone to get on with building those properties. Public land is available on which they can be built, and it can.

We have to divide homelessness into two categories. There are rough sleepers—people who are on the street and who are at severe risk. Their health is bad and they are likely to be attacked. Many of them are on the streets for the first time and are extremely vulnerable. As I said in an intervention, it is likely that they will die as a result of sleeping rough. That is an absolute scandal in this day and age. They cost the health service huge amounts of money. They are likely to be addicted to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. We cannot blame them for that, because they are in a spiral of despair. We have to come together as a House to make sure that no one gets to the stage of sleeping rough.

There is also the problem of the hidden homeless—the sofa surfers. These are people who stay with family and friends until they exhaust all their family and friends and end up on the streets. Unless we address that issue, we will not solve the problem.

Last night, I went out with a brilliant team from St Mungo’s to identify people on the streets of the city of London who are sleeping rough. It is clear that those individuals have complex needs. It is not a magic solution to say, “Give them somewhere to live or sleep and that is the end of the problem.” They need counselling and support. They need a whole package of measures to help them get back on their feet and live what we would all call a normal life. Unfortunately, providing accommodation is not sufficient. That is an important point.

Equally, it is clear that one problem in society now is that private sector landlords are reluctant to rent homes to people who are homeless. I therefore ask the Government to consider a national deposit scheme, so that people who are in need of housing in the private sector can be provided with a deposit at a national level, rather than relying on local authorities to identify a deposit for them. That would secure private rented accommodation for people who are not in priority need. That would make a huge difference to the number of people who are declared homeless but are not assisted. We know that one of the challenges for people who are in difficulty is finding the deposit to buy a house or for private rented housing. That is something that the Government should consider.

I look forward to the publication of the White Paper on the development of new homes and the housing strategy. We all have to be clear that housing is a market. If we start interfering in a market, there are unintended consequences. I trust that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench have considered all those aspects and, rather than tinkering with some of the measures, will get on with a national house building programme that we can all be proud of and with measures that will alleviate the homelessness crisis. I look forward to the other announcements that will no doubt follow. Measures to reduce rough sleeping are paramount. If we do not address that problem quickly, we will lose too many people too early.

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[Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab/Co-op)]

Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, I was taken by surprise a bit. There is nothing like having two Welsh Members following each other, is there?

The motion before us notes that 120,000 children will be homeless this Christmas. That is a fact that should alarm every Member of the House and shame the Government for their inaction. The levels of homelessness across the UK show the worst consequences of ignoring the most vulnerable in society. There can be no excuse for the fact that the number of people sleeping rough doubled between 2010 and 2015. While this Government are refusing to acknowledge rising homelessness, I am glad to see a different approach being taken by the Welsh Government. In contrast to the Government in Westminster, the First Minister and his Government have shown time and again that they are not afraid to tackle the problem head on.

Unlike the UK Government, the Welsh Government have continued to fund affordable homes to rent as well as buy, allowed councils to suspend the right to buy in areas of high housing pressure and have not forced local authorities to sell vacant homes to the highest bidder. On top of that, the Welsh Government have introduced a housing Act designed to reduce homelessness through a stronger focus on prevention and, despite significant budget pressures, provided the necessary funding and resources.

[Bob Blackman]

On that point, is the hon. Gentleman aware that the total number of people presenting themselves as homeless for the whole of Wales is less than the figure for the single London borough of Lambeth?

[Chris Elmore]

I acknowledge that and understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying. What I am trying to stress is that there are different and more positive approaches to tackling homelessness, and the Welsh Government are leading the way on that.

I am incredibly proud of the action taken by the Welsh Labour Government to tackle homelessness, but equally I am incredibly proud of the work of the last Labour Government in this House and their efforts. When Labour is in government, be it in Wales or the UK as a whole, homelessness falls. Under the two previous Labour Prime Ministers, statutory homelessness fell by almost two thirds, and the number of people sleeping rough fell by three quarters. In Wales, in the first year of the Welsh Government’s Housing Act, 65% of families assessed as threatened with homelessness were successfully prevented from becoming homeless, as the shadow Secretary of State for Housing and indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) mentioned.

This House needs a cross-party approach to tackle the scourge of homelessness across the UK. Labour Governments have repeatedly shown that it is possible to take action, and I hope this Government will today take note and work to help find everybody a home.

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[Bob Blackman]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks about me. Does he agree that one of the issues for rough sleepers and people threatened with homelessness is the complexity of the various reasons? Homelessness is not always the result of a private sector rental coming to an end. It may be caused by relationship breakdown. A homeless person may be an ex-offender or someone leaving the armed forces who is not used to settled accommodation. All these issues need personalised plans to assist those people to get into decent accommodation.

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. Sometimes it is easy for us to simplify the challenges surrounding homelessness and rough sleeping, but most informed Members know that the position is far more complex. I welcome the provisions in his Bill for a personal plan that local authorities must go through with individuals, both people who are homeless and are owed a duty by a local authority to be housed and people who are not owed a duty to be housed. For the first time, they will get bespoke support. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that.

My hon. Friend is right to point out that we must deal with this challenge at a local level, but I am also absolutely committed to making sure we work effectively across the Government to tackle it. I am driving action across the Government through a ministerial working group on homelessness, and one example I can give the House is in regard to mental health, where we are looking at what more can be done to make sure rough sleepers with mental health problems get the specialist support they need. The group is also looking at how we can ensure that people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness, receive the help they need to get into work.

I want now to pick up on a number of the comments hon. Members made. First, it was great to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond). She extolled the virtues of the way in which Portsmouth City Council is trying to tackle homelessness, particularly through prevention and the work it is doing upfront to try to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. It was good to hear that the council is also working closely with local charities and other partners, and that is something we certainly want to see in the proposals local areas bring to us in relation to the grant-funding programmes we are providing.

The hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) made a number of important points. She mentioned the rough-sleeping statistics. They are now much more accurate than they were in 2010, when local authorities were not obliged to provide a return to central Government in relation to how many rough sleepers there were in their areas. They are now compelled to do that, so the data are far more accurate. We are looking, though, at how we can improve the data that the Department holds, and we are doing so by trying to work out when people become homeless on multiple occasions and how we can prevent that from happening again to them.

I welcome what the hon. Lady said about the work Boots is doing in relation to sanitary products for women who, unfortunately, find themselves sleeping rough—an issue that she is particularly interested in. A number of programmes are centrally funded from the Department for Communities and Local Government for outreach organisations that deal with rough sleepers. In that sense, we do provide funding to those organisations, and they do, in turn, provide the type of support the hon. Lady rightly recognises is required for women rough sleepers.