Homelessness

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I want to talk about the issues facing young people today and then about complex cases of homelessness and the related problems.

At Prime Minister’s questions on 23 November I mentioned Aberdeen Cyrenians, a charity in my constituency. In fact, I think it may be in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig), but it is in my city anyway.

[Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

Our city.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Our city; I am sorry. I mentioned that charity and asked the Prime Minister about how austerity is increasing homelessness. The Prime Minister’s answer included the phrase “living within our means”, which is unfortunate phrasing. Homeless people do not have any means to live within. They do not have a house or other things. Today’s debate has been much more considered and measured and a lot less political than that exchange at PMQs.

I have heard young people today—as in people under about 35 or 40—being described as the precariat. They have precarious jobs. The gig economy is increasing and they do not have the long-term jobs that people used to have. They are subsisting on zero-hours contracts and do not have the same level of security as previous generations, who could walk into a job and have it for life. They do not have security in housing. They live incredibly expensively in the private rented sector, where not enough safeguards are in place to ensure security of tenure. As has been mentioned, people can come home and find that their locks have been changed, and their private sector landlord feels that that is the way forward. A huge number of landlords are not like that, but enough are to make it a problem.

Young people today are in precarious situations, and the risk of homelessness is real and one that we have not seen in recent generations. A study published in September found that 40% of families have less than £100 in savings. Much has been said today about so many of us being just a step away from homelessness, but that bears repeating—40% of families have less than £100 in savings. People do not have the extra cash in their pockets to deal with an unexpected change in situation, so homelessness is perhaps a bigger risk than it has been previously.

With austerity, benefits sanctions and the changes to the benefits system, the people with the most complex, chaotic lives are being disadvantaged the most. The Government cannot easily get them back into work, and they represent a figure that a few weeks of jobcentre intervention will not change. They need months of intervention—some may need years—due to their complex problems, including mental health issues, homelessness and being unable to hold down a job in recent years. They require huge amounts of intervention before they will be able to get back to being tax-paying, working members of society. It is quite easy, if the Government say they are not going to provide intensive support for those people, for them to fall between the cracks. Allowing that to happen in those complex cases is one of the worst things that this Government have done, and that causes a real issue of homelessness.

A huge number of other things can lead to homelessness. Domestic violence has been talked about a lot, and we have a debate on it on Friday. It can lead to women or men—in the main it is women—fleeing and finding themselves homeless or in an insecure tenancy. That is a real problem that they have to deal with at a time when they are going through a huge number of other problems too. Again, that problem is sometimes being left alone because it is too difficult to tackle and it is not an easy statistic to change—the Government cannot easily get people back into work and back into a secure place.

As someone who was elected to a local authority in 2007, I am a passionate advocate against the right to buy. I saw the damage it caused to our communities and the number of people who do not have a permanent roof over their head as a result of it, and the Government need to change their plans on it.