Homelessness Reduction Bill

Karen Buck Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 28th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I welcome the Bill and think that it will make a real difference with regard to early intervention and prevention and to broadening the scope of assistance to those who are currently defined as non-priority—a category that often masks the real range of experience of many of the people who are seeking help for homelessness. In common with many of my Labour colleagues, I have major reservations about the capacity to deliver the proposals. I will touch on that, but I still think that it is worth supporting the Bill. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on promoting it, Crisis on its work in support of it, and the expert panel that helped to draw it up.

A number of Members have mentioned what has happened with homelessness over the years. As a Member of Parliament in central London, and before that as a councillor, I was there when homelessness exploded in the 1990s and through the early part of the last decade. I then saw the progress made over the second half of the last decade in bringing down the rates of homelessness and rough sleeping, but the problem is worsening again. We have heard about a doubling of rough sleeping, but rough sleeping is only the tiniest tip of a huge iceberg. It is an intractable and difficult issue, but one that masks a much wider problem of homelessness.

We know that acceptances of households that are in priority need have gone up by a third in the past few years, and that 58,000 were accepted as homeless last year, but that also masks something much bigger. I am surprised that we have not heard anything this morning about the existing local authority framework for homelessness prevention and relief, which is a series of measures intended to prevent homelessness in priority groups. Last year, 220,000 households received help through prevention and relief, and more than 1 million households have received prevention and relief assistance since 2010. That gives us an idea of the sheer scale of the problem that we have to confront. It is clear that not enough is being done in the present circumstances.

I welcome the Bill because I think it will help to bring about a cultural shift and reach people who are currently not receiving assistance. Like many colleagues, I know those people as individuals, not as statistics. Anna had terminal cancer and heart failure. She was single and lived in a private rented property that the landlord was seeking to recover because of a rent shortfall. She sought help from Westminster in order to have settled and less stressful accommodation for her palliative care. She wrote that the council

“are saying that they are unable to register me”

for a council property,

“because homes are in short supply and only people with severe medical conditions or welfare problems can apply for it.”

Anna was dying. We fought for a year to get her housed and won only just in time.

Ahmed, who was 21, was thrown out of his home and then a hostel, for behavioural problems, and was stabbed through the hand while sleeping rough. He was diagnosed with psychosis, but was repeatedly turned away from the council as non-priority. I took him to a central London hostel myself, but it turned him away because his problems were too severe for it to accommodate him. That case took two years of court battles to resolve.

I first met Heidi when she was lying in bed, sick from chemotherapy for breast cancer, in a private rented flat with no facilities and two tiny children, waiting for the bailiffs to come before the council would provide her with accommodation.

There are many young people like Jamal, who was severely depressed and slept in his car because of violence in the home, which was worsened by severe overcrowding: there were six of them in a one-bedroom flat. I could not demonstrate that he was homeless, because it could not be verified that he was sleeping in his car and I could not get anybody to that part of London.

Trey was 19 years old and slept in terror in the doorway of his mother’s repossessed flat. He was too afraid to go anywhere else to sleep, but it was impossible to get anyone to verify that he was sleeping rough.

Finally—these have been just some of many examples—Michael was sleeping rough in the west end after being refused priority, and the medication that he was required to take for his condition had to be kept refrigerated. During the review of his homelessness decision, he was told, wrongly and unethically, that there was no need to accommodate him, because it was possible for a local GP surgery to store his medication.

Those are the kinds of cases that I hope the Bill will do something to resolve. Those people have complex problems but cannot get over the threshold of priority need. They need additional advice, assistance and support, not simply a list of telephone numbers to ring. I am sure that, as I have done, colleagues have sat and rung those numbers for hours on end but have been unable to get assistance. In some cases, councils do not even record applications from vulnerable families; they are turned away without an application even being taken.

Measures similar to this Bill in Wales have made a real difference. I hope that the Bill will make a comparable difference in England. In common with many of my Labour colleagues, I feel that welcome though these provisions are, they have been introduced in the context of a rapidly deteriorating situation. Only one in five private landlords in London now accepts households on housing benefit. There are fresh housing benefit cuts to come, and the Housing and Planning Act 2016 will worsen the provision of social housing in central London.

I will give the House just one tiny statistic: there were 300 people sleeping rough in Westminster every night last year on average, and housing associations in Westminster alone have sold 300 one-bedroom flats to meet the Government’s targets. Life is not quite as neat as that, but it goes to show that the problem is worsening on the one hand and the ability to respond to it is worsening on the other. The Government’s welfare and housing agenda reforms will make the situation worse.

The Bill will be equivalent to running up a down escalator, but I still think it is worth doing and I want it to be supported. As we have heard from the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, there are some drafting problems, particularly in clause 1, and some things need to be tightened up as the Bill progresses, but it is a welcome Bill. Unless the Government address the underlying causes, which, in many cases, they have created or are deliberately making worse, I fear that the Bill will not bring about the transformation that we want.