Homelessness

Ed Davey Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) and all those who have spoken so far have made passionate speeches, showing how they care about homelessness in their constituency. I hope, therefore, that if my Homelessness (End of Life Care) Bill gets a Second Reading, they will be there to support it. I share their passion, but I want to make a boring speech. I want to speak about the estimates that are before us today—this is an estimates debate. The reason is—to make a serious point—that the House does not do its job properly, and has not done so for decades, because it does not hold the Government to account for their draft budgets and how they spend taxpayers’ money. This Parliament talks about parliamentary sovereignty all the time; I wish we had some, but until this Parliament stands up to the Executive and plays its role in analysing how the money is spent, we will not have anything like parliamentary sovereignty, Brexit or no Brexit.

I make that point with respect to homelessness because there cannot be many other issues on which it is as important that the House get to grips with the money. To illustrate that point, I refer hon. Members to the estimates, which I am sure they looked at ahead of this debate, including the central Government supply estimates published last April, which are the subject of this debate. Nothing in the many tables and figures in the section on the Department for Communities and Local Government, as it was then, talks about homelessness; they are all in very broad aggregate totals that tell us nothing. This is completely unnecessary. Other Parliaments, including the New Zealand and Swedish Parliaments, are given detailed information on spending. They get to deal with the figures and so make real decisions on how the money is spent. We do not, and that is shocking.

[Chris Evans]

I seek the right hon. Gentleman’s advice. He was a Minister for five years. Was this his experience of the Department he ran?

[Sir Edward Davey]

Yes, it was indeed, and when the Cabinet debated ways to improve value for money, I made the same argument. The then Prime Minister was interested and asked the Cabinet Secretary to pursue it, but unfortunately, after several meetings, it was blocked by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I move now from the main supply estimates to the supplementary supply estimates, which—again—I am sure others have read in detail. These are a little more illuminating and come with a proper memorandum. Hon. Members might be interested to know that they reduce the amount of money for homelessness. It might be for a good reason—I do not know—but it talks about a £9 million reduction in the flexible homelessness support grant. Apparently a new procurement strategy and vehicle is being set up that means the money cannot be spent. I am sure that that £9 million could have been spent on homeless people. It also talks about removing £16 million from the Move On fund—it could not be spent in-year and so apparently has to be spent later on in this Parliament. That is another £16 million not being spent on homelessness. Perhaps the Minister, who I am sure has been briefed for this debate, can tell us why £25 million has been lost from the homelessness budget this fiscal year. If we are to get to grips with this, we have to get to grips with the money.

[Jamie Stone]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that something could be learned from the close scrutiny the Scottish Parliament gives to these figures? That might be instructive for this place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Davey]

I agree with my hon. Friend. One advantage of devolution is that we can experiment with new ways of doing things, one of which might be better scrutiny of the money.

I am a bit of a geek on this. I wrote a pamphlet about 15 years ago on it. I did some research and found that the last time the House voted down a request from the Government was 1919, which shows that the House has basically given up its role in scrutinising the Budget properly. When one asks for more information, one ends up going to the National Audit Office, which does some decent work on the figures to help the Public Accounts Committee, which is behind the report we are debating now. I refer hon. Members to the NAO report on homelessness published last September, which shows the full extent of the problem. It shows that local authorities spent £1.148 billion on homelessness in 2015-16—the last year we have figures for—of which £845 million was spent on temporary accommodation and £303 million on prevention, support and advice. There is little detail beyond those big aggregate figures, which do not tell us much about how the money was spent.

The commentary in the Auditor General’s report is instructive. Paragraph 128 states:

“Local authorities fund the cost of homelessness from a number of different sources… The Department does not know how much of each source of funding is used for each component of homelessness services. Without this information, it cannot fully understand the impact that reducing one source of funding will have on the others…the Department does not have the information it needs to predict where a cut in funding will limit a local authority’s ability to meet its duties.”

What does that mean? The Department does not know. We are not told. Who does know? Who knows where this money is being spent and whether it is being spent in the best way possible? It is time we got our Parliament up to scratch. Then we can talk about parliamentary sovereignty.

I turn to others parts of the NAO report, which we paid for—it is an expensive and detailed report and we ought to read it properly. It is provided to the House free for Members. I refer them to paragraph 24, which is headed, “Conclusions on Value for Money”. It says:

“The Department’s recent performance in reducing homelessness therefore cannot be considered value for money.”

We need to get to grips with this. The money we are spending is probably not enough and the way we are spending it is not very good. We will not tackle this problem until we sort ourselves out.

The only thing we can find is the trends, and the trends are worrying. We have been spending more in recent years on dealing with the symptoms of the problem—temporary accommodation—but less on prevention. It is great that we have the Homelessness Reduction Act—a brilliant piece of legislation—but we are spending less on prevention, which is not what Parliament wants. Homelessness is a scar on our society. We in this place are elected to do our job properly, to scrutinise the money and tackle this problem. Until we sort out our processes on things such as public expenditure scrutiny, we will never do that job properly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Davey]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent point. Does she agree that the fact that the Housing Act 1996 describes people as “becoming homeless intentionally” is quite outrageous and offensive? Is not that the exact point that she is making?

[Fiona Onasanya]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and I absolutely agree with him. I should also put on record that I was a commercial property solicitor before coming to this place. No one becomes homeless intentionally. I know that that Act looks at whether someone has taken steps to put themselves in a particular position, but no one takes steps to make themselves homeless. Someone could lose their job, for example, and be two months behind with their mortgage, or they could get into arrears with their rent and have their accommodation repossessed. Did they deliberately not pay their rent? No, there were factors that meant they did not have the funds to do so. I absolutely agree that no one is intentionally homeless.

Being or becoming homeless is an unintended consequence of many factors, and we are not doing enough to address that. Over £7 billion of cuts have been made to housing benefit support since 2010, with 13 separate cuts to housing benefit over the past eight years, including the bedroom tax and breaking the link between housing benefit for private renters—local housing allowance—and private rents. I believe that the 169% increase in rough sleepers since 2010 is a direct result of decisions made by Ministers in this place to reduce funding for homelessness services, and of a lack of action to help private renters.

The issue of homelessness has not been adequately funded, and there has been a steep drop in investment. I understand that the Government are looking at being fiscally minded, as the hon. Member for Harrow East said, and paying attention to what they are spending, but we seriously need to invest to save in this regard. This is the sixth richest country in the world, and we cannot have people sleeping on doorsteps who are unable to look after themselves and who have nowhere to call home. We cannot have people who are sleeping on sofas falling through the gaps because they are not considered homeless. That is unacceptable. We have a chance here to make a difference and to do something. We have a chance to invest in lives, because we are here to serve people. If we forget that, we have forgotten who we really are.