Homelessness

Marcus Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Marcus Jones)]

I thank the Opposition for bringing this important debate to the House. It has given Members across the House an opportunity to discuss a critical issue, and it gives me the opportunity to outline the actions that this Government are taking to meet the challenge.

This has been a good debate. Time does now allow me to do justice to all the contributions, which were excellent, but I will endeavour to respond to as many of the points as I can within the time available. As my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning stated at the outset, the Government are committed to tackling homelessness. I reiterate that that is a priority for me and for the Government. No one should find themselves without a roof over their head. As my hon. Friend outlined earlier, we are supporting the largest house building programme of any Government since the 1980s, but as many hon. Members have said, homelessness is not just a housing issue. Tackling it requires a collective response at both national and local levels and an unrelenting focus on prevention.

There are many good examples of early intervention around the country. We want to drive good practice to help all areas learn from the experiences and take on the good practice of the councils that are doing things the right way. To kick-start this, we have launched a £50 million homelessness prevention programme, which takes an end-to-end approach to preventing more people from becoming homeless and helping people to get their lives back on track when they have fallen through the safety net provided. Our programme will mean innovation and collaboration to prevent homelessness.

Our £20 million grant funding for prevention trailblazer areas will help areas to go further and faster with reform, laying the groundwork for many of the changes that we want to see through the Homelessness Reduction Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman). Those areas will develop and adopt best practice and data-driven approaches to identify people at risk of homelessness and provide them with early support to prevent a crisis.

Southwark, Newcastle and Greater Manchester—our early adopters—will be taking forward a range of initiatives. Successful projects will involve collaboration between a wide range of services to identify people who are at risk of homelessness and help them well before they are threatened with eviction. Trailblazer areas will test innovative approaches to preventing homelessness to help us build our evidence base on what we know works.

The £20 million rough sleeping grant fund, which forms part of this programme, will enable local areas to intervene early with rough sleepers before their problems become ingrained and to build a better local multiagency partnership to address people’s underlying problems. Building on the successes of the London rough sleeping social impact bond, the £10 million rough sleeping fund for social impact bonds will allow local partnerships to work with some of the most entrenched rough sleepers, focusing on getting them into accommodation and using personalised support to address their complex needs.

[Bob Blackman]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks about me. Does he agree that one of the issues for rough sleepers and people threatened with homelessness is the complexity of the various reasons? Homelessness is not always the result of a private sector rental coming to an end. It may be caused by relationship breakdown. A homeless person may be an ex-offender or someone leaving the armed forces who is not used to settled accommodation. All these issues need personalised plans to assist those people to get into decent accommodation.

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. Sometimes it is easy for us to simplify the challenges surrounding homelessness and rough sleeping, but most informed Members know that the position is far more complex. I welcome the provisions in his Bill for a personal plan that local authorities must go through with individuals, both people who are homeless and are owed a duty by a local authority to be housed and people who are not owed a duty to be housed. For the first time, they will get bespoke support. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that.

My hon. Friend is right to point out that we must deal with this challenge at a local level, but I am also absolutely committed to making sure we work effectively across the Government to tackle it. I am driving action across the Government through a ministerial working group on homelessness, and one example I can give the House is in regard to mental health, where we are looking at what more can be done to make sure rough sleepers with mental health problems get the specialist support they need. The group is also looking at how we can ensure that people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness, receive the help they need to get into work.

I want now to pick up on a number of the comments hon. Members made. First, it was great to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond). She extolled the virtues of the way in which Portsmouth City Council is trying to tackle homelessness, particularly through prevention and the work it is doing upfront to try to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. It was good to hear that the council is also working closely with local charities and other partners, and that is something we certainly want to see in the proposals local areas bring to us in relation to the grant-funding programmes we are providing.

The hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) made a number of important points. She mentioned the rough-sleeping statistics. They are now much more accurate than they were in 2010, when local authorities were not obliged to provide a return to central Government in relation to how many rough sleepers there were in their areas. They are now compelled to do that, so the data are far more accurate. We are looking, though, at how we can improve the data that the Department holds, and we are doing so by trying to work out when people become homeless on multiple occasions and how we can prevent that from happening again to them.

I welcome what the hon. Lady said about the work Boots is doing in relation to sanitary products for women who, unfortunately, find themselves sleeping rough—an issue that she is particularly interested in. A number of programmes are centrally funded from the Department for Communities and Local Government for outreach organisations that deal with rough sleepers. In that sense, we do provide funding to those organisations, and they do, in turn, provide the type of support the hon. Lady rightly recognises is required for women rough sleepers.

[Rob Marris]

May I take the Minister back to the question of data? The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for example, raised the issue of hidden homelessness and sofa-surfing. The Minister has just said that the figures on rough sleepers are getting more accurate—I welcome that—but what are the Government doing to collect more accurate data on hidden homelessness and the sofa surfers, who are particularly at risk of becoming rough sleepers?

[Mr Jones]

That is obviously a much more difficult thing to measure, but with regard to the Homelessness Reduction Bill, which the Government are backing, I am absolutely sure, and we are certainly factoring this into our sums, that a significantly higher number of single people who are homeless—the type of people the hon. Gentleman identifies—will present at a local authority, because they will expect to receive far better advice and support than they do now, and they will have a personal plan, which we hope will allow their homelessness to be alleviated. So I think we will be able to measure that in a better way. On whether we can go as far as identifying all those people, I think that would be rather difficult.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East was right to identify the challenges, particularly in London. He was also right to identify the record funding—£3.15 billion—that the Government are providing to the Mayor of London to build 90,000 new homes across a range of tenures to suit the needs of Londoners. It is great to see that in a spirit of co-operation the Mayor has welcomed that record funding.

My hon. Friend also hit the nail on the head when he said that just having a place for a rough sleeper to stay is not enough, as we discussed earlier in the debate. We have to look at the underlying personal challenges and tackle them in the work that we do. The cross-Government working group that I lead is looking to tackle a number of other issues in that regard.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (David Mackintosh) made an excellent speech in which he particularly highlighted his knowledge of this subject as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness. He highlighted the tragic consequences that can happen where rough sleepers are not supported sufficiently, as did the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) and my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight). I was heartened to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South about his support for the Government’s programmes, particularly those on tackling rough sleeping.

The hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) mentioned a housing association in her constituency that she said was not providing adequate housing conditions for its tenants. That is an extremely serious situation if it is the case. I recommend that she take that up with the local council. I would be keen to hear more detail from her on the types of issues that are being experienced. I can say, as somebody who was quite heavily involved in the Housing and Planning Act 2016, that there are now significant penalties for rogue landlords. Local authorities can now levy significant financial penalties of up to £30,000 on rogue landlords who do not provide adequate housing for the people to whom they rent property.

My hon. Friends the Members for Colchester (Will Quince) and for St Ives (Derek Thomas) made excellent speeches underlining the causes of rough sleeping. They were absolutely right to highlight the role of charitable workers and volunteers, who do tremendous work up and down the country. I would like to thank those volunteers, on behalf of the Government, for doing such an excellent job on behalf of a group of very vulnerable people.

The hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) mentioned funding for the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East has brought to the House. I can assure the hon. Lady that it is the Government’s intention to fund the Bill. We recognise that new burdens will be created, and as the new obligations on councils come forward, we will fund that. We fully expect, though, that the Bill will create a situation whereby councils deal with homelessness far more quickly. It will therefore become far cheaper for local authorities to deal with and support people because they will not be dealing with a housing crisis as often as they do currently. She referred to temporary accommodation. I can assure her that, by law, temporary accommodation must be suitable. If it is not in the case of the constituent she mentioned then that constituent has the right to a review and should go back to her local authority in that regard.

This has been an excellent debate on an extremely important issue. Our ambitions are backed by a new funding programme and the most ambitious legislative reform in decades. This Government are taking an end-to-end approach to tackling homelessness because we—

[Mr Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) (Lab)]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I hear the Opposition Chief Whip asking whether the Question might now be put, but I think he was just pipped to the post by the Minister concluding and sitting down.

[Mr Jones]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I beg to move that—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

No, the Minister had perfectly discharged his duty, so there is no necessity for the Question on the closure to be put. I shall put the Question.

Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), that the original words stand part of the Question.