To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to support people who were previously homeless into permanent housing after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Question was considered in a Virtual Proceeding via video call.
My Lords, the Virtual Proceeding on the Question for Short Debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, will now commence. This debate is time-limited to one hour. I therefore remind noble Lords that the time limit for Back-Bench speakers is one minute.
Good afternoon. I am grateful for this opportunity to raise a very pressing issue that bothers us all. Anybody who has been involved in homelessness or anyone who walks the streets of our cities will have seen over a considerable period thousands of people there who are completely beyond the legal remit. They are not a part of the social compact that we have as citizens and as voters. They are outside society and have remained outside of it for many decades, certainly since the early 1960s.
When I was a rough sleeper and a beggar in those times, if you so much as sat down in public and went to sleep or if you were begging, you would be pursued by the police. That was the old way of doing things. Obviously, we did not want to keep using those old draconian Vagrancy Act-style methods, so instead what we did was just ignore the homeless on the streets. We left everything to charities and organisations like Crisis, Shelter and St Mungo’s. They have done an incredibly rich and useful job for us all, but the time has come when we cannot allow the streets to return to what they were pre Covid-19. We cannot decant the homeless from the places that fortunately they have taken up—not all of them; some people are still out there. I meet and talk to them, and I am sure that many noble Lords have seen them on occasions when they have been out and about in city centres. There are not enough places for the homeless.
What happened when we began to respond to the Covid-19 crisis? Mr Jeremy Swain, who was working with the rough sleepers initiative and was the tsar, so to speak, and Dame Louise Casey were put in charge by the Government to lift people off the streets and put them into places of safety. They were taken away so that they could be socially isolated. I want us all to commend the hard work of Dame Louise Casey, Jeremy Swain and all those organisations which came together to do this wonderful thing. They broke away from the fact that for decade after decade we had been ignoring these people and had left them outside of democracy. We left them on the streets to die in an abuse of human rights of an untold kind.
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Lord Sheikh (Con)
My Lords, I have been involved in providing meals to the homeless and have had limited contact with them. According to official figures, in 2019 there were 4,266 rough sleepers in England. They are the most vulnerable group in society. Some of them have physical and mental conditions. I commend the Government, local authorities and charities for finding accommodation for 90% of rough sleepers during the pandemic. However, there must be an effective long-term plan, backed by ethical investments, to find suitable permanent accommodation for all homeless people. This should be a holistic programme that involves input from the Government, local authorities and various organisations. Will the Minister tell us to what extent this is being done? We welcome the establishment of the task force headed by Dame Louise Casey. We appreciate that the Government are committed to ending rough sleeping by the end of this Parliament.
My Lords, I spoke about the problem of homeless people, particularly in London, on 29 April. In his reply, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord True, said that
“the Government believe that we have reached some 90% of those we wish to.”—[Official Report, 29/4/20; col. 266.]
That does not quite tally with what was in the Guardian today, which says that only 1,000 homeless people have been offered hotel rooms, which is better than nothing, out of 8,555 rough sleepers. I suggest that the noble Lord, Lord True, needs to change his wish or try a bit harder.
The noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke about progress, but that is surely made best by local authorities, which are starved of cash, despite the Prime Minister saying that he will do whatever it takes. He is not doing it. Where is the money? This is a massive failure of central government. The National Health Service gets a lot, but the Government are still starving local authorities of the cash to deal with rough sleepers and longer-term needs. I hope the Minister will give us some comfort when he replies.
My Lords, if we are to deal with the underlying problem of rough sleeping we must identify the individual cocktail of events that has led somebody there. We tend to think of them as a category of people. All of them will be a series of individual stories. Will the Minister say whether there is any plan to test for underlying reasons why a person has failed to get the support systems outside? Will they particularly check for what is commonly referred to as special educational needs, such as dyspraxia, dyslexia and attention deficit disorder—anything that would mean that someone would find it difficult to handle the process of filling out forms, attending meetings on time et cetera? If we can get a handle on this and get coping strategies into this group, we may well help ourselves.
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Government’s initiatives in this area—both the £3.2 million allocated recently to councils as a special response to the virus and the previous money made available. In their 2019 manifesto, the Government pledged to end rough sleeping by the end of this Parliament. An unlooked-for benefit of this terrible virus, and the toll it is taking on lives in causing distress, is that it gives the Government a real window of opportunity to make that pledge a reality. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to address the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, of how many rough sleepers have still not been housed; it is very important to get an accurate figure.
However, the point is that this valuable initiative now needs to be built upon to find permanent places for rough sleepers to live. I will make two brief points on this. First, charities and faith groups are usually to be found on the front line of this work. It is essential that the cells or hubs that the Government recommend setting up include not just council departments and NHS staff, but those who are, day by day, in touch with rough sleepers and know their needs and problems. I believe I have come to the end of my minute. I end by saying that I very much welcome the Government’s initiative and hope that we will see the end of this blight on our society very soon.
My Lords, I applaud the achievement of accommodation having been offered to 90% of rough sleepers. The community collaboration that achieved this reflects the focus of the housing commission set up by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury of building strong communities alongside homes. What plans do Her Majesty’s Government have to create multiagency partnerships to create an integrated homelessness system?
Those who are homeless with NRPF are particularly vulnerable when discharged from temporary Covid-19 accommodation since they cannot access social tenancies. What consideration have HMG given to the pathways offered to NRPF migrants who have been temporarily accommodated? I welcome the establishment of a rough -sleeping task force. Does the Minister agree that this task force must also consider those at risk of homeless due to the crisis? Last winter, church night shelters provided a lifeline to 2,000 rough sleepers. To avoid a peak in rough sleeping next winter, what plans do HMG have to protect those at risk of homelessness?
My Lords, I live in London and I am therefore most familiar with the situation here. I understand that there are 4,000 rough sleepers in hotels across London. Without government support, these people will certainly end up back on the streets. To avoid this there must be capital investment from the Government, with landlords bringing empty houses back into use, and, of course, access to affordable, good-quality private rented sector accommodation procured centrally to avoid local authorities competing for limited stock. Ultimately, a significantly funded programme of housebuilding by local authorities to provide public housing is clearly needed. Adequate housing for all is surely an ambition to which we all aspire. As a human rights issue, it is something that we simply must achieve.
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We have brought people in and they are now as comfortable as can be, bearing in mind that it is very difficult for someone to come in from the streets where they were living a limited life and being put into a fine place like a Trusthouse Forte hotel—I cannot remember where they have all been put. Oh, I am sorry, my wife has just reminded me that they have been put into Travelodges and Holiday Inns. They would be wonderful places to be at any other time, but maybe not for people who are socially isolating when what they want to do is get out and have a cigarette, walk around the block and maybe talk to someone.
The Government have taken responsibility. This is the first Government since way back during Victorian times to have said that people living on the streets are their responsibility. They have lifted them up and put them into places of safety where they are living as well as can be expected.
Fortunately, Covid-19 will end and we now need a plan. What will we do? Will we decant these people back on to the streets? Will we pretend that things are as they were, or have we seen the promised land, in the sense of government responsibility and our own responsibility, and will we say, “No, let us not put them back on the streets, let us put them in a place of safety. Let us put them in therapeutic communities where they can deal with all the demons that have led them to end up on the street—all the social problems, all the cocktail of social failure, all the damage they have done to themselves and has been done to them when they were younger, all this”? These people have come out of local authority care, out of the prisons or out of our Armed Forces; through problems with mental health, they have dropped down and need our help. We cannot decant these people back on to the streets.
I am very pleased to say that Dame Louise Casey, who I have known for many years and have had many fish and chip suppers with—she is a lovely lady—and Jeremy Swain, who I know as well, and he is a lovely geezer, have come up with an idea. The task force has said it will find a way to provide for people once the Covid curfew is over. I want the Government to say, “We will not allow this situation to happen again. We will have to find a way to respond to it.”
Bear in mind also that there will be enormous pressure on budgets and on the streets because, post Covid-19, there will be people who will have problems, who have been left high and dry, who have been left beached by the crisis. There will be people with mental health problems, and people who have run away from blasted, broken relationships. Lockdown will have left them very vulnerable if they are in abusive relationships —we have seen enormous increases in women suffering domestic violence. What do we do about them? What do we do about the people who have been left high and dry without the means of sustaining themselves, because their business or their job has disappeared, or the place where they live has disappeared? We will have a bit of a rocky ride when we get to the end of this, and now is the time to begin the process of thinking this through.
I know it is a historical exaggeration to make a comparison with 1941, when Winston and Clem dug Beveridge out of retirement and had him work on a plan. Obviously, he published his findings in 1943 and they laid the basis of the welfare state, but we need a plan now. We need to do the work. What are the Government prepared to do? Will they talk to people like us, who have been going on resolutely for decades? Do not leave people out on the streets, because it is a human rights abuse. Because it is a human rights abuse, why are we ever entertaining people dying earlier, falling into mental ill-health and all these problems? Now is the time: we need to know what the plans are. The Government need to pull together a Beveridge-type response to the social crisis which will overwhelm them if they do not respond to it. Homelessness is obviously only the tip of the social iceberg—there are all sorts of other things—but we have to be strong here, and not in any way talk about returning to the old days.
The Big Issue has been removed from the streets. I was fortunate that when I talked to Jeremy Swain we worked out that we had to stop the Big Issue on the first day of lockdown and remove sellers because of their health and the problems that they might pass on to people who buy it. Unfortunately, that means that the Big Issue disappeared from the streets. We are putting it together and if anybody has a bundle of money and wants to help us, throw it our way. We would love it, especially from Her Majesty’s Government.
However, the point is that we are going to be there, trying to help people to get back. We will have to go back to the idea of a hand up, not a hand out. At the moment, we are helping people and supporting our vendors, but we are stuck. We are not expecting them to work because they cannot.
This is a great opportunity to break the morass that for almost the whole of my working life has enabled us to see homeless people on the street left outside society —no longer citizens, no longer performing persons. The social contract that we have with the Government, the state, our local authorities and all that did not extend to them. Let us extend it. We must put our arms around the homeless. Let us not decant them back on the street, because that would be a mockery of our democracy and of what we have been through when we have seen so many people pull together for the benefit for us all. Let us have one for all, and all for one.