Street Homelessness

Paul Sweeney Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Adam Holloway]

I will change that sentence. A person can make money in order to buy drugs to feed their addiction—that point was pretty clear in what I said.

An added complexity is that there seems to be a perception among some of those involved in helping the homeless that in order to access services someone needs to sleep on the streets. Surely we should be helping people earlier. The endless churn of people entering the system—many of whom could and should have been helped earlier—makes the job of organisations who are trying to care for those vulnerable, and trapped, people even more difficult.

[Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about the trapped nature of many homeless people. I recently visited a homeless shelter in Glasgow and I discovered a vicious cycle for people who might get a job, but they cannot then secure it because they do not have a bank account, and they cannot get a bank account because they do not have a job or permanent address. That puts people into a spiral of despair, which may well lead to them having addiction problems—no wonder they have addiction problems given the cycle of despair they are in.

[Adam Holloway]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s overall point. I think the business of not having an address has been dealt with by quite a lot of charities, but it is clearly much harder to hold down a job for someone who also has the complexity of sorting themselves out every night and living on the streets. I definitely agree with that.

How should we tackle the problem? From my experience of sleeping rough in 2018, I would say that our priority must be to ensure that we do not make the mistake of lumping all rough sleepers together. That stops us recognising people’s problems, and often means that we not go far enough to tackle the underlying reasons for rough sleeping. We also need urgently to address how mental health problems experienced by rough sleepers are identified and treated. Since my recent experience on the streets, a link has been made between the scaling back of mental health services and a rise in homelessness. An outreach worker, and former rough sleeper, told me only yesterday how he literally begged a doctor to get him some sort of treatment when no mental health services were available to help him.

Outreach workers also speak about their frustration at the lack of emergency mental health assessments, and the desperate need for help at the right time and in the right place. A supervisor at the No Second Night Out hub in London said that sometimes when someone arrives who is obviously suffering from a mental illness, the charity has to hold that severely mentally ill person in the hostel for up to three weeks before they get a mental health assessment. During that time the support workers, who are not psychiatric nurses, have to try to contain the situation, which is hugely challenging. If the person is accepted into an NHS mental health unit—that does not always happen, particularly if the person is a drug addict—more often than not, as has been said, they are simply released on to the streets a few weeks later.

Clearly there is an urgent need for mental health teams to be embedded with outreach teams so that they can look at the needs of an individual and refer them without any delay for the treatment they require. Homelessness charities say that there is no point putting enormous amounts of money into general mental health budgets, where it just disappears. The money has to go to the tip of the spear and stay with those people as they go through the system, so that we do not get the churn I have spoken about.

Thankfully, the problem of homelessness seems to be higher up the political agenda than ever before, and the Government’s 2015 Budget increased central Government funding for homelessness programmes to £140-odd million over the following four years. However, it is important that that money is used correctly, at the tip of the spear, focusing on the immediate needs of those on the streets and getting them the help they require, rather than being wasted on intervention that comes too late or does not tackle the root cause of someone’s homelessness.

If we are serious about this issue—I think the Government’s target is potentially over-ambitious—we must see people as individuals not just as homeless people. We must differentiate between different groups and have the courage to look at whether the provision of service is enabling some people to live on the streets, but obscuring others from the help that they need. We must think carefully about whether public kindness is enabling some addiction, and whether by lumping everyone together we are masking those in real need. In this country where we spend gazillions of pounds on a welfare state, we must try to rescue the people at the very bottom of our society from roaming the streets of our cities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Melanie Onn]

Absolutely, and I will come on to that issue shortly. This problem is not insurmountable. When Labour was in government, there was an unprecedented drop in homelessness, but since 2010 it has worsened by every measure. As the hon. Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis) made clear, the doubling of rough sleepers since 2010 is a problem of the Government’s own making. Home ownership is at a 30-year low. The average home costs eight times the average salary. Today in England there are 120,000 homeless children. The building of social rent homes has plummeted, with fewer than 1,000 last year—the lowest level on record.

The Minister, who has responsibility for homelessness, recently said that she did not know why homelessness had risen. I find it very hard to believe that anyone in this place cannot immediately see some of the main reasons for homelessness increasing. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) rightly recognised some of them: a lack of social and council homes; disproportionately high rental increases making homes unaffordable for those on lower incomes; reductions in council funding meaning less for drug and alcohol services; crippling welfare reforms that have cut too fast and too far for those who were genuinely just about managing; and difficulty in accessing mental health services as the thresholds for those services get ever higher.

I shall take the opportunity to highlight some of the innovative work that NAViGO mental health services is undertaking in my constituency. It has worked closely with the local housing association to purchase properties and then uses them as step-down accommodation to support the service users who come to it for help, to ensure that they have wraparound care. That is the principle of Housing First in action in measures being taken by innovative organisations around the country.

[Mr Sweeney]

My hon. Friend gives very good examples of people who are homeless being given assistance. I wonder whether she will share my dismay at a letter that I received from Eleanor Wilson, a medical student in Glasgow, last night. She said that she witnessed, in a branch of Starbucks in Glasgow, a homeless man who was just queuing for a cup of coffee being told to get out of the premises. That is one of a litany of issues with Starbucks in the city of Glasgow. Starbucks cannot pay its taxes—does not contribute to helping the public realm—and is also ostracising homeless people on our streets who need help. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is totally unacceptable for a corporate citizen of the UK?

[Melanie Onn]

Absolutely. I think that we all have a responsibility. The hon. Member for Gravesham talked about a society that is enabling homelessness, but I think that there is room for compassion when dealing with people who have myriad social, economic and personal issues driving them to be in this situation.

A sensible welfare state provides security to those in society who need it. That has been eroded over the last eight years, creating an underclass to the extent that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has stepped into the Government’s shoes with its report published yesterday in the New Statesman and identified 78 homeless people who have died this winter. That is 78 human lives lost, 78 people without a place that they could call home, 78 lost people. Why do I call them “lost people”? Because the Government do not collect those figures centrally. Because in response to my written questions and those from colleagues about deaths associated with rough sleeping, the Minister has repeatedly brushed that question off. There was no acknowledgement that the central collection of data would prove to be of discernible use—that it would better inform the Government of the scale of the issue at hand and provide some evidence and a means by which Government initiatives could be measured.

The Minister’s Department seems similarly unaware of which local authorities have commissioned adult safeguarding reviews in the event of homelessness-related deaths in their area, so we cannot know which local authorities have good practices and which need improvement. Will she agree today to start collecting centrally data in relation to deaths from homelessness? For everyone’s information, at least 59 men and 16 women have died. Their ages ranged from 19 to 68, and 14 of those who died were under the age of 35.

I congratulate them on their assiduousness, but it should not take investigative journalists calling round councils, charities, coroners’ offices and police forces to establish a full picture of how many people are dying on the streets of our country. And it is not just those figures that matter. The Government should be doing better in collating general information about people who are rough sleeping, because the accuracy of those figures is wholly insufficient. In the official figures, the estimated figure for rough sleepers in my constituency sits at around 22, but the list that I get every single month from my local outreach services shows more than double that number.