Rough Sleeping

Christina Rees Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members to wear masks when they are not speaking. This is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room. Members should send their speaking notes by email to [e-mail]. Similarly, officials should communicate electronically with Ministers.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered ending rough sleeping.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. It is a joy to be back in Westminster Hall with colleagues after what has felt like a very long time. While it looks a bit sparse, and I appreciate that there is a lot going on in the Chamber, I know that ending rough sleeping is important to many Members across the House. I am grateful to have been granted this debate to bring it up the agenda.

Here we go again: we are debating how we end the blight of rough sleeping. The pandemic has shown us that the will and capacity to radically change policy is there, albeit in an emergency. “Everyone In” was without doubt a success. It was a phenomenal response to an international health crisis, but it is not a sustainable response to a national rough sleeping crisis. That is what I want to focus on. The pandemic has shown that there are systemic problems preventing us from grasping the nettle and getting to the root causes of rough sleeping and homelessness.

I do not dispute that “Everyone In” was remarkable, and I applaud the Minister and the Government for their efforts. During the pandemic, 355 people in Oxford were brought off the streets and out of hostels into safe accommodation. Now, 215 people are in settled housing. It is becoming clear that we need to turn our minds to a long-term, permanent solution. Insight from the CHAIN database tells us that in 2021, at the height of the pandemic and the “Everyone In” campaign, London saw more people returning to rough sleeping than it had in the last four years. That is about one third of the rough sleepers that were on the streets. Why, when we had the successful programme, was that happening?

We have to ask those who were affected. There is a gentleman called Mr T, who spoke to the Mayday Trust last year as part of their “Wisdom from the Pandemic” work. From Westminster tube station, just metres from where we are now, he said:

“They gave me a room in a hotel. It was miles away. I was lonely, everyone I know is here. I didn’t know what was going on, how long I was going to be there, so I came back here.”

The “Everyone In” campaign may have worked, but it did not work for everyone. We need to learn from these experiences.

Councillor Ben Martin, cabinet member for housing at Swale Borough Council, told me that his experience is that rough sleeping must be about the individual, not the symptoms, and about their hopes and dreams, not their problems. To fundamentally end rough sleeping, we need to treat rough sleepers and the homeless as humans with individual needs, not as statistics. Take substance abuse. Councillor Fran Oborski, who is the treasurer of a homelessness charity, emailed me about how many rough sleepers have substance abuse issues—something that is often not helped in hostels or temporary accommodation—and said that we need to improve access to rehabilitation services for those who want or need them.

Someone who used to be homeless and who now works with rough sleepers emailed me to say that the speed with which services want people to make progress only adds to their problems instead of solving them. Given the pressure the services are already under, they cannot address the traumas rough sleepers have faced. That point is echoed by the Salvation Army, which points out that we need more funding for support services to tackle the root causes.

“Everyone In” brought people off the streets, but it did nothing to repair trust between many rough sleepers and authorities—councils, services and Government. Someone who simply goes by the name London Homeless Info emailed me to say that they are sceptical about the aims of councils, charities and services. We will not solve the rough sleeping crisis without addressing that issue of trust. How do we do that? That is what we all want. How do we break the negative cycle of people returning to the streets and failing in those services—and, more to the point, those services failing them?

The liberal approach would be to empower those forced to sleep rough, not to dictate—as is often unfortunately the case currently—narrow pathways designed by others. People going through tough times should be able to decide for themselves what support they want, and the state should then be ready to respond. I appreciate that that is no easy task and actually flips the entire system on its head, but if we actually listen to rough sleepers we know what they want.

Gemma, who was sleeping outside Joe & The Juice on Oxford Street last year, told the Mayday Trust:

“Living in a hostel is no life. It doesn’t help me with my depression. The atmosphere feels like a graveyard in there.”

Richard, who was begging on Victoria Street, said:

“I’m being told I have to go to a hostel; I really don’t want to go. I know I will relapse. Everyone there takes drugs. I’m trying to stay sober but they are forcing me to go.”

Talk about a rock and a hard place—someone gets themselves on their feet and is told that they have to put themselves in a position that will send them backwards.

The answer to rough sleeping is not just more money, more emergency accommodation or more housing, especially social housing. We have to look beyond the statistics. All of that is important, but when we are commissioning the services, we need to change our mindset. We are commissioning with, not just for, people. We need to provide them with unconditional and personalised support.

We also need to appreciate, Ms Rees, that a rough sleeper could be us. They could be our friends or our family members. Their stories highlight that often what causes someone to become a rough sleeper is a series of events that compound—family breakdown, job loss, ill health. We cannot think of rough sleepers as an other. They are us. We need to give them the autonomy and respect that any one of us in this room would want.

Aspire and Oxfordshire Homeless Movement do something like that. They treat the person as an individual, with coaching, and catch them just before the point of rough sleeping. After Adeline reached out to them, she says, she has

“now found a part-time live-in role, complemented by my freelance graphic design work, and sleep well and safe. This experience made me realise that anyone can become vulnerable at some point in their life”.

I dare say that, after the pandemic, more and more people of a background that most of us here might recognise—perhaps even more than before—are ending up in this situation.

The Mayday Trust has done lots of work to develop a new approach called the person-led, transitional and strength-based response, or PTS. That gives people the ability to choose the support that they want at a time that works for them, working with someone who coaches them through and helps them find the right pathway. Upcoming research from the New Economics Foundation shows a correlation between being treated with dignity and respect and a person taking positive actions. We all want those positive actions to happen, because that is how we end the rough sleeping crisis. That kind of approach—trusting people with their own decisions—helps to build trust between the individual and the state.

As the Local Government Association, Crisis, Shelter and others have said, we urgently need a renewed, detailed, cross-departmental strategy for how the Government plan to meet their commitment to end rough sleeping by 2027. I say that knowing, of course, that the Minister takes a particular interest in this matter. However, we are very concerned that, to end rough sleeping, we need all Government Departments to join up in their thinking. Without a new strategic approach, the Government will not meet this manifesto commitment. The Government have broken three of those so far. Will this one be next?

The Government are not short of expert recommendations from local government, the sector and elsewhere to draw on. Crisis, which has an event after the debate that I want to plug to all Members, is absolutely right to urge the Government to adopt the Housing First approach to permanently end homelessness for those with the most serious needs. Should the Treasury be listening, if the priority is to rebuild our finances after the pandemic, then it should prioritise the analysis published by Crisis today, which shows that Housing First is cost-effective. For every £1 we put in, we get £1.24 back because we are reducing dependencies on services. It is win-win. Can the Minister tell us if there have been any discussions with the Treasury and the Chancellor ahead of the spending review about rolling out Housing First across England?

The Government are making things harder by cutting the universal credit uplift and freezing the local housing allowance. Shelter has suggested a model of “protect, prevent and build” for this strategy, which I hope the Minister is considering. Shelter, the LGA and individual councillors have told me about the need to fix local authority funding in this area. There should be ongoing, dedicated funding for councils to tackle rough sleeping and prevent homelessness in the first place.

Councils need to be given sufficient time to bid for money, and then to spend it. Giving them two to four weeks to bid for the rough sleeping accommodation programme, which requires that properties are purchased and occupied within the same financial year, makes it almost impossible for local authorities in the south-east to be successful. Surely some common-sense tweaks to that bidding process could achieve better value for the money that is coming in.

There are more lessons that we need to learn, but at the heart of a renewed strategy must be that the rough sleeper is an individual. They should be part of the process, not have policies imposed on them. I have heard too many stories of the bad experiences some people have had with councils, rogue landlords and service providers. I fundamentally believe—I genuinely do, which I do not often say—that this Government want to improve the situation, but I urge them to put it high up on their priority list because 2027 is not that far away. The pandemic has been challenging, but it has also provided an opportunity to see what can work. I say grasp this nettle and use this opportunity.

In conclusion, I have a few simple questions. The Minister will be surprised that I have not mentioned this yet, but when will we scrap the Vagrancy Act 1824? I have been banging on about this for over four years. Six months ago, the Secretary of State said that it is happening. Please can we have an update on some timelines? When will we give councils certainty and long-term funding for rough sleeping programmes? Will the Minister come back to the House with a renewed, detailed and thought-through strategy for how we are going to end rough sleeping for good, recognising the changing circumstances that we are in?

We need to give rough sleepers support, but I urge the Minister to consider that the plan must also give them control. What we are doing is not working, particularly for the last few, who will be the most difficult to win round. We need to start building a strategy that reaches out to them now if we are to be successful in just over five years’ time. With a combination of intervention through programmes like Housing First, prevention through better mental health and financial support and through social house building, and empowerment through a system that works with the individual, we can do this. I believe there is cross-party support to do it. I thank all those who are here today and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

We do not need to concern ourselves with time limits.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Eddie Hughes)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees, but more importantly, it is a pleasure to see you not just at 6 o’clock in the morning at the gym, which is where I am more used to seeing you.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

Too much information there.

[Eddie Hughes]

My apologies, Ms Rees.

I thank the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) for securing the debate. We may be few in number in Westminster Hall, given that other important things are going on in the Chamber, but we are all committed to the cause. Generally, this has been a largely unpolitical debate—sometimes the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) and the SNP draw us more towards the political element of the discussion, but perhaps that is no surprise. It feels to me that in this room we have a bunch of people who are committed to this cause, regardless of political affiliation. That is a nice place to be.

We have half an hour, and although it is not my intention to use all that time, a slightly less formal approach might be warranted in the discussion. For example, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon mentioned Aspire in her opening speech. One of the things I find critical in my role is that we do not make services and do things to people, we do things with them, and an important part of that is to speak to those people who have experience of the rough sleeping system. I believe 30% of Aspire staff are in that position. It is incredibly important that it is not just a bunch of civil servants or MPs in London creating the policies, but that we are making sure that we take account of the people on the ground who know what they are talking about.

On the issue of support at a time that works, as a Minister, during the summer I had the opportunity to go out and about round the country, and I went to Fairmount Lodge in Shipley. Through the rough sleeping accommodation programme, a building that was originally built in the early 1900s is now converted into one-bedroom and two-bedroom flats, and co-located in the building is the local support service, so that people can access care at the time they need it. There is a concierge on site 24 hours a day, to protect the flow in and out of the building so that inappropriate people are not coming in. Care and support is brought into the site from other groups, such as drug and alcohol abuse support organisations, so we are not sending people out to appointments that we expect them to attend all the time.

Members have mentioned the “Everyone In” programme, which provided, for example, the opportunity to make sure that people saw dentists or GPs for the first time. We held events where I have been joined by, for example, the vaccine Minister. Some people said it was the first time they had seen Health and rough sleeping Ministers attending meetings together. Let us hope that in the future we develop the appreciation that homelessness and rough sleeping are about not just the absence of a home, but the health requirements that go with that.