Rough Sleeping

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma, and to follow my friend the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), alongside whom I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for this very important debate.

It is difficult to conduct a debate about rough sleeping without viewing it in the wider context of homelessness. The hon. Gentleman gave a compelling and comprehensive speech; it will not surprise him that I do not agree with all of it, but much of it I do agree with. He referenced a lot of the all-party parliamentary group’s work, and I will try not to repeat too many of the points that he made so eloquently. I also thank the Minister. I know it has not been a very easy 12 months for her, but she has worked very diligently on this issue and I thank her and the Secretary of State for the roles they have played.

Over the past 12 months we have seen a small decrease in rough sleeping, but it is important to point out that that is in the context of increases in London, Birmingham and Manchester in particular, and of figures still showing an increase of 165% since 2010. I welcome the Government’s ambition to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and end it entirely by 2027, but that is too long. I put it to the Minister that we must be far more ambitious.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I know that the figures are disputed and that the CHAIN—combined homelessness and information network—statistics show differences year to year, but with a decrease of 2% a year it will take until 2052 to deal with rough sleeping in Britain, and that is frankly not good enough.

[Will Quince]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention; I picked up on that point, which the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group, also made. I think it is a little misleading, if I dare say so, on the basis that the past year is the first year in which a number of interventions kicked in, the largest of which is the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, so it is not necessarily correct to say that we will see a 2% decrease; we should see a much sharper decrease this year, next year and the year after. Of course, the key is ensuring that we stay on top of those figures and, through further debates such as this one and through the all-party parliamentary group, we continue to hold the Minister and Secretary of State’s feet to the fire to ensure that those ambitions are met.

However, I think we need to go much further. To tackle homelessness and rough sleeping, it is important that we truly understand it. The hon. Lady mentioned the statistics; the reality is that we do not entirely know, because in nearly all cases they are estimates. We have some reasonably good estimates for London, but for the rest of the country they are often based on a headcount on a single night, at one point of the year. As the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark rightly pointed out, numerous people will come into a town centre of an evening or during the day, because they can beg, and people will be kind and generous. However, because of the danger of violence in the evening, they will actually head out of town to parks and recreational spaces to sleep in tents, so may not be picked up in rough sleeping headcounts.

We know that the reasons for homelessness and rough sleeping are numerous, varied and complex. I wish it were as simple as saying that the answer is just more money, but money is only part of the answer. To some extent—I err on the side of caution when using this phrase—homelessness is a little like an illness. Successive Governments have thrown huge amounts of money at the problem, which, a bit like a painkiller, has worked in masking the pain but has not actually treated the underlying condition or, even better, actually cured it.

An old adage that works just as well for homelessness and rough sleeping as for anything else is that prevention is always better than cure. We need a two-pronged approach that covers both. In order to prevent homelessness and to help those currently homeless, we have to truly understand them, looking at those numerous, varied and complex reasons and then putting in place timely interventions to address each and every one of them, otherwise we risk regression.

The all-party parliamentary group goes to all parts of the country, and I have seen too many cases, particularly in London and my constituency of Colchester, of rough sleepers who have been through the council system. They have had support and been through temporary accommodation, and in many cases have been given social housing, but for so many reasons that has failed. That is one of the biggest problems, and if we do not address those underlying issues that cause homelessness at the outset, the likelihood of regression is sadly very high.

We need much better data—as I said, we have reasonable data for London but not for the rest of the country—in order to understand those root causes of homelessness and then address them. We know some of the causes. They include poverty, debt, eviction and section 21 notices to end assured shorthold tenancies, which are now the No. 1 cause of homelessness. They also include relationship or marital breakdown, domestic violence, landlords not letting to those in receipt of benefits, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental health issues, leaving prison or care, being LGBTQ—a particularly vulnerable cohort—hospital discharges and leaving our armed forces, which the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark mentioned.

We also have to consider the wider context. In 2017-18, we built 6,463 social homes, yet nearly 1.2 million people are on council housing waiting lists. Successive Governments have not built anywhere near enough social homes.