Rough Sleeping

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Neil Coyle]

I have not been able to disagree with a single intervention yet—someone will have to challenge me. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.

There is a positive and a negative: the positive is that the public care about this issue. Volunteers help out, and even St Mungo’s in my constituency relies on them to do the outreach. I went on a walkabout with them, to support homeless people and to try to get them into shelters during the very cold spell last year. The public appetite is there. People are willing to give their time and donations to address the issue. That, however, is in the face of eight years of annual increases in homelessness and of Government policies that directly contributed to that rise. That is the negative.

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

Organisations such as Depaul and the YMCA have projects that help thousands of young people who sleep rough, nationally and in North Tyneside. Does my hon. Friend agree that those organisations should have the Government’s ear on policy issues? Depaul, for example, would like to see the shared accommodation rate put back to the 30th percentile of local rents, so young people can have somewhere affordable to stay at night.

[Neil Coyle]

Again, I agree. I was going to mention Depaul specifically because it has a base in Bermondsey. Its policy is for equal benefit levels for young people—their rent is not cheaper just because they are 20. That is a complete falsehood that leads to arbitrary levels of benefit that do not match people’s needs. Depaul does some fantastic work in Bermondsey and beyond.

The church-run Robes Project, which is specific to Southwark and Lambeth, opens for five or six months in winter. Every year, it has had to provide more accommodation as a result of the outcome—whether intentional or not—of Government policies. That strikes at the same point. If the organisations working on homelessness, as well as those with experience of it, were listened to, some of that could have been avoided.

The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) mentioned universal credit; I have had constituents, including one with a significant mental health condition and another self-employed and in work, who were made homeless as a result of universal credit. That was avoidable. That direct link is unacceptable, but there is no brilliant data set for identifying those kinds of people.