Boris must end the scourge of homelessness

If there’s one thing, aside from Brexit, that defined Theresa May’s dismal time in office, it’s inaction. She has left Boris Johnson with a vast in-tray after her domestic agenda died on the vine. After the 2017 election debacle her government was fragile and became bogged down in a Brexit induced political deadlock, so it was difficult to allocate time and energy to other policies or pass legislation. This was compounded by her natural indecisiveness and penchant for micromanagement.

Then along came Boris like a breath of fresh air, promising to break the deadlock and ‘get Brexit done’. It was an enticing slogan and Boris delivered, but now it’s time to get working on that brimming in-tray with the same determination. The country is beset with problems in need of policy solutions, and at the top of the pile is the national disgrace that is the homelessness epidemic.

I remember returning to my hometown of Hull for the first time in years in 2018 and being shocked by the groups of homeless people camped out in the city centre. In the previous decade you would see one or two, but now there were large groups in little camps and beggars wandering the streets. This is nothing compared to Manchester and London is beginning to resemble a dystopia and seems to be worse every time I step out of Kings Cross.

This has become a national emergency. For the thousands of vulnerable people sleeping rough, getting this done is vastly more important than Brexit. It was disheartening then to hear Boris Johnson make a factually inaccurate claim last week that rough sleeping is at an eight-year low. It doesn’t fill one with confidence that he’s going to step up and tackle the problem.

The Prime Minister said the “scourge” of street sleeping was “lower than any time in the last eight years”. But his claim, made during the ‘People’s PMQs‘ from Downing Street, is incorrect. Rough sleeping in England has risen by 165% since 2010, from 1,768 in 2010 to 4,677 in 2018. This is shaming.

His exact words were “There is one good bit of news, one floating glimmer of good news – which is the number of rough sleepers has come down a bit over, on the figures of the last eight years […] It’s lower than any time in the last eight years”

Rough sleeping has indeed “come down a bit”, falling by 2% from 2017 to 2018. But it is not “lower than any time in the last eight years”. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, he may have confused matters and meant to say it had come down for the first time in eight years. The PM admitted homelessness is “a scourge and a disgrace” and praised the ‘no second night out’ scheme that operated in London when he was mayor, which helped to catch people early before life on the streets becomes routine.

For such schemes to work on a national scale there has to serious funding allocated. The problem also goes beyond rough sleeping, with many more people at risk of becoming homeless including tens of thousands of people staying in hostels, refuges and shelters. There are 127,370 children in temporary accommodation – up 75% since 2010. Their situations are precarious and must be considered within the wider strategy.

There is no getting around it, the homelessness crisis is governmental failure and a result of policy choices made by the Conservative Party. If Boris wants to differentiate himself from his predecessors, he should deal with this, and what a fantastic part of his legacy it would be.

The Conservatives have introduced a Homelessness Reduction Act and a Rough Sleeping Strategy, vowing to eliminate rough sleeping altogether by 2024. However, to get the root of the problem they are going to have to put their money where their mouth is. Funding for local homelessness services has been cut by £1bn a year, around 9,000 hostel beds have been lost, housing benefit has been cut 13 times, and there’s nearly 200,000 fewer council homes for those most in need than there were in 2010.

The government needs to address the systemic issues that lead to people sleeping on the streets. Cuts to frontline services, welfare reform and lack of affordable housing are the main factors in the increase in homelessness and the government won’t meet its targets without addressing these root causes.

Back in 2012 I was volunteering for a social care charity at the time that there were incoming sweeping cuts to public funding for third sector organisations. This struck me as a total false economy from George Osborne and so it has proven. The social costs have been huge, and the NHS and the police ultimately must pick up the pieces.

The government should create new homeless hostel places and support organisations that help to support the homeless and provide vital drug and alcohol treatment. Addiction is a major factor in keeping people suffering on the streets and leading them into crime, outsourcing the alleviation of such social problems to specialist organisations can work with proper government support.

The government must take big steps to deal with the housing crisis and providing low-cost housing to those that need it most to transform their lives. This means liberalising planning laws to get Britain building again and breaking the stranglehold of NIMBY anti-housing groups. It should also mean increasing the supply of social housing to provide affordable homes will also help get people off the street.

This national crisis can be resolved, but it needs to be a mission led from the very top and it necessarily means rebuilding parts of the safety net that George Osborne hastily hacked away. If it hasn’t been dealt with by the time he leaves office, this will be a stain on Boris Johnson’s record.