Rough Sleeping

Melanie Onn Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince]

I had not seen that, so it would be ill-judged to comment on it. I can point the hon. Gentleman to a very fine article from only last week in, I believe, the Colchester Gazette, authored by the local MP, on why we need the most ambitious Government investment in social housing since the second world war. I will touch on that in a little bit.

Sadly, we have an estimated 4,677 people sleeping rough on our streets, and 277,000 homeless households. That is due in part to a lack of security in the private rented sector, which, as I mentioned, is now the biggest single cause of homelessness. We have areas where demand massively outstrips supply, including some of our major cities and large towns, with Colchester being a prime example, so landlords will not let to those in receipt of benefits.

The Government have done some great work, which is starting to make a difference and gives some reason for optimism, including the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. I was pleased to speak at all stages of its passage and to sit on its Bill Committee. There is also the £28 million Housing First pilot, the rough sleeping initiative and the Somewhere Safe to Stay pilot. There is funding for non-UK nationals sleeping rough. There are rough sleeping support teams and mental health support outreach workers. Improvements have been made to StreetLink and there are homelessness experts in jobcentres. Those are all part of that £100 million package to support the rough sleeping strategy announced last year.

My concern is that, worthy, important and valuable as those programmes are, they treat the symptoms, not the cause. What do we need to do? The first thing I should say to the Minister is that I do not have all the answers. However, I have some suggestions on ways in which we can start to prevent homelessness and address the issue. First, we need a full nationwide roll-out of Housing First as quickly as possible. The three pilots were important and a great start, but we know that it works; we have seen it work in other countries, particularly in Scandinavia, where rough sleeping has been entirely eradicated. Secondly, fewer than half of local authorities have a night shelter, so we need to fund and build more of those. Regional hubs are hugely important.

As the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark mentioned, we need to lift the freeze on the local housing allowance, which was introduced in 2016. We also need to embed and fully fund the Homelessness Reduction Act. It is a great piece of legislation, but we must monitor it to make sure that it is working and is fully funded and, equally importantly, that local authorities use it to its full and interpret it in the right way. That is hugely important, particularly in relation to the duties it places on them. As the hon. Gentleman also mentioned, we need a help-to-rent scheme. We need to look at people who have no recourse to public funds. In London and some of our big cities, between 30% and 40% of rough sleepers are non-British nationals and are not entitled to any support, so we need to find a solution for those individuals.

We need to start treating homelessness, and particularly rough sleeping, as a health issue. I mentioned alcoholism, drug addiction and mental health issues. We need mental health support workers to go out with every outreach team up and down the country. I am pleased to see that £30 million will be invested in that regard, which will make a huge difference. For the Minister to say at one of our all-party parliamentary group meetings that the Department very much sees rough sleeping and homelessness as a health issue was an important step change.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman may feel positive about the Government accepting that homelessness should be seen as a health issue, but his Government have cut public health funding.

[Will Quince]

The hon. Lady makes a good point about health funding. I have raised my own concerns about that privately with Ministers. There is a huge amount more work to do in that area. I specifically refer to outreach workers going out in our towns and cities across this country and providing support. It is often those outreach workers who are trusted to provide that support. However, I very much take her point.

Minister, we need specialist, well-funded interventions for those high-risk groups that I mentioned—particularly prison leavers, care leavers, survivors of domestic violence and the LGBTQ community. We have to give more support to those amazing charities and voluntary organisations that work so hard to tackle homelessness up and down our country. Many of those charities have been in existence for decades, but the pressures on them now are huge.

--- Later in debate ---

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) on securing this debate. I also congratulate him and the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) on all their hard work as co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness, not just in the winter months but all year round. They have championed the issue since they came to this place in 2015, and they have been very successful at drawing together organisations, individuals and Members from across the political spectrum to highlight the incredibly difficult circumstances and the plight of the most vulnerable in our society today.

I also thank the organisations that have circulated excellent briefings to Members: the Local Government Association; Mind, whose parliamentary reception I attended last night and will discuss briefly later; Depaul UK, which has been mentioned extensively; St Mungo’s, a steadfast charity that does incredible outreach and support work for people who are homeless; Agenda; Shelter; and Women’s Aid. Those are the organisations whose briefings I have with me, but there may well be others—so many organisations are pleased that we are having this debate.

The number of hon. Members who have participated today shows how important an issue homelessness is and how rapidly it is rising in the public consciousness as a demonstration of what our society is like today. I think a moment of reckoning is coming, because the number of people who are rough sleeping is increasing all the time. The Minister may well challenge me on the point, but in every city and every town around the country, people are experiencing homelessness. Our community’s perception of just how damaging that is for individuals and how it reflects on us all needs to be tackled far sooner than 2027, which is the date that she has given.

It would be very welcome if we discussed the issue all year round, not just in the cold winter months when it is plainly obvious that it must be deeply unsettling for anybody to sleep rough, wrapped up in blankets on the pavement or on cardboard. We cannot just have a sudden moment of conscience when it is cold and raining; it is a year-round issue that we should make every effort to tackle.

Sleeping rough is something that nobody should have to experience. Its impact is dire. Those who sleep rough are more likely to develop drug and alcohol dependency or experience increased problems with mental and physical health, and they are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Six hundred people, with an average age of just 44, paid the ultimate cost while sleeping rough last year. They included 43-year-old Gyula Remes, a father of two, who died just outside this Palace while waiting for his first pay cheque.

It is shameful that an estimated 4,700 people slept on the street on a single night last year, with many more sleeping in cars, sofa surfing or out of sight of the authorities. I stress that that is an estimated figure—several colleagues have raised the problems with having estimated rather than concrete figures. Unless we know the real scale of the problem, we have no hope of tackling it. I hope the Minister will take that message away.

Rough sleeping has more than doubled since 2010, so we have to acknowledge that specific policies put into place by this Government, and by the previous Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, have led to more people suffering on our streets. We cannot ignore the impact of a housing system that is not fit for purpose, a stripped-down drug and alcohol support system, cuts to hostel and supported accommodation provision, and ill-thought-through changes to the benefits system that are leaving people homeless and driving them on to the streets. My hon. Friends the Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) both mentioned the importance of supported housing, which is critical in ending the cyclical nature of homelessness and making sure that people have support—that they are not just given a roof over their heads and left to their own devices. It is also critical that supported housing is properly monitored to make sure it is fit for purpose and people are not put in dangerous situations.

Last week, I visited Rugby and met Labour’s candidate, Debbie Bannigan, who took me to see the work of Hope4. That organisation has seen a huge rise in the number of people using its services. It relies on donations and lottery funding to provide clothing, meals and somewhere to stay for just a few short hours throughout the day, as well as shower and laundry facilities—the only services in the whole town available for people who are rough sleeping.

The reality is that the root cause of rough sleeping is the failure to provide adequate housing for all. Booming house prices and a failure to build anywhere near enough social housing that is truly affordable—a point that we should really start to hammer home is that it needs to be truly affordable, because “affordable” has become an artificial description—mean that far too many in this country are living in housing insecurity. That is precisely the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) is drawing to our attention with his campaign for more social homes, and for council housing in particular. Social housing was once available to many who had a housing need, but a number of social rented homes equivalent to a city the size of Coventry have been lost through a combination of a move into so-called affordable housing, and schemes such as right to buy. The failure to provide adequate replacements means that in places such as Southwark, applicants for social housing may wait an average of three and a half years for a two-bedroom council property.

Many people are now in the private rented sector, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) raised the need for more security in that sector. At the moment, tenants may face unfair and punitive bans on properties across the sector, landlords may impose punitive rent rises if they want a tenant to leave and renters may be evicted through no fault of their own with just two months’ notice. I know my hon. Friend is deeply concerned about those points.

Last night, I attended the launch of Mind’s “Brick by brick” report, which tells us just how devastating housing insecurity can be for tenants with mental health problems. One in four such tenants have serious rent arrears, and they are four times more likely to report that poor housing is making their health worse. GPs spontaneously identify housing issues as a common contributing factor to their patients’ poor mental health. When the last barrier to homelessness is a rental market that is simply unsuitable for many people with complex or specific needs, it is unsurprising that many end up falling out of it and into homelessness and rough sleeping.

If the Government are serious about eradicating rough sleeping, they must eliminate the housing insecurity that fuels it. That requires more social housing and a private rental sector that places security of tenure at its heart.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) was particularly clear—2027 is far too long. Why does the Minister not raise her ambitions and bring that date forward? What is stopping her from doing that? I am sure that by now she knows what the causes of homelessness are. It is not just Opposition Members who are saying this; it is her own Back Benchers, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) said that in five years’ time, we will have the glory of being back to where we were in 2009. That is not an achievement.

Will the Government look to address the shortage in social housing by placing a moratorium on right to buy and pledging to build 1 million genuinely affordable homes over 10 years, to make sure that we get back the council stock we need to get people off the streets? Will the Minister also address the insecurity that many in the private rented sector face by scrapping section 21 and reaffirming the rights of tenants on social security to rent without discrimination? That is something that I have raised with the likes of Zoopla. Will she tell us when we should expect a response to the Government’s consultation on longer tenancies? It closed five months ago and we are yet to hear anything. I also ask her to support the calls of the leader of the Labour party—as, surprisingly, the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) has done today—and recognise the absolute pointlessness of the Vagrancy Act 1824.

Even if tenants find themselves homeless, it should not mean that they end up on the streets. After almost a decade of austerity, however, councils simply do not have the resources to provide the type of homelessness service that is needed to end rough sleeping.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Mrs Heather Wheeler)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck, and that of Mr Sharma before you. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) on securing this debate and thank him and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) for their tireless work as co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group for ending homelessness.

This is a debate about rough sleeping, so I am thankful for the experiences and expertise shared today, whether that comes from a constituency or a wider perspective. I am grateful to hon. Members for their speeches and questions; I hope to answer them as I work through my speech, but given the time limit, I may not answer them all.

Ensuring that everyone has a decent, affordable, secure home is a core priority for this Government. That is why we have made a commitment to halve rough sleeping, as everybody has said—I am glad that everybody knows it—by 2022, and to end it by 2027. It is an ambitious target, but it is essential that we achieve it. Underpinning that bold commitment is a concerted cross-Government effort to address homelessness in all its forms.

As hon. Members will know, last year we launched the rough sleeping initiative, working with the areas with the highest levels of rough sleeping, and with the support of charities and experts from across the sector, many of which we have heard about today. We announced the rough sleeping strategy, backed by £100 million, and introduced the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, the most ambitious homelessness legislation in decades, with prevention at its heart. In total, we have committed £1.2 billion to 2020—a not insignificant amount of money—to ensure that the most vulnerable in society have the support they need.

I, for one, am encouraged by the figures published last week which show that our approach is working. This is a significant moment. For the first time in eight years, the number of people sleeping on our streets has fallen. That follows year-on-year increases, with an average annual increase of nearly 16%, so we are moving in the right direction. To be clear, our rough sleeping initiative has been up and running for five months in those 83 areas, and those areas have seen a 23% reduction in the count. That is just the beginning; we are bringing in further funding and embedding services. I look forward to seeing progress at the next count—which will deal once and for all with any question of my resigning.

I know we still have a way to go and, as many of you have remarked, it is simply unacceptable that people have to sleep on the streets in 2019. That does not reflect our country, which we want to be the best, which is why I am determined to put a stop to it. The cross-Government rough sleeping strategy, announced last August, is the blueprint for sustained action, looking across the spectrum from prevention to intervention to recovery. In the six months since our strategy was published, we have focused our energies on delivering key commitments that will help those in need and prevent people from sleeping rough in the first place.

We have announced the early adopters of our rapid rehousing pathway, an approach that a number of hon. Members have called for today, which includes 11 areas with Somewhere Safe to Stay hubs. A hub has already started delivering in Nottingham, helping people to secure routes off the streets, with the specialist support that the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) was so keen to secure. We have also secured up to £30 million in the NHS long-term plan for specialist mental health services for people sleeping rough, which will be informed by the findings of a health provision audit to be carried out this year. We have provisionally allocated £34 million for 2019-20 to the 83 areas with the highest levels of rough sleeping to continue their excellent work supporting those currently on the streets, and opened up bidding for a further £11 million to all other local authorities to support them in helping people off the streets now.

There are particularly encouraging results in the 83 areas supported by our rough sleeping initiative, which is backed by £30 million of Government investment this year. In those areas, numbers have fallen by almost a quarter. Indeed, almost three quarters of RSI areas have reported decreases from the previous year. I thank councils across the country for working tirelessly to support people off the streets and into recovery. Those figures are proof of what can be achieved when we all pull together in the same direction.

In just seven months since the funding was announced, councils have used the investment to create an additional 1,700 beds and employ 500 dedicated staff, such as outreach workers, mental health specialists, nurses and substance misuse workers. This means that there are more people in warm beds tonight as a direct result of Government funding and the wrap-around support that goes with it. An excellent example of this is the local authority in the constituency of the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, who secured this debate. It is receiving £615,000 this year, which provides funding for a worker from Solace Women’s Aid to support offenders who have experienced domestic abuse, and a further 72 new beds to tackle rough sleeping.

Some 33 Members have spoken in this debate, including both interventions and speeches. The right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) made a fascinating intervention—at the last count, there were no rough sleepers in Knowsley.

[Melanie Onn]

But there is no proper counting system—

[Mrs Wheeler]

With respect, that is not good enough—