The Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto promised to “end the blight of rough sleeping” by 2024; four years later the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reported the biggest year-on-year percentage increase since 2015.
According to the ONS, 3,069 people were estimated to be sleeping rough on any given night last year – an increase of 26% on the previous year, and a 74% increase since 2010, when the Conservative-led coalition took office. The devastating figure is down from the 4,751 rough sleepers counted during the peak of the homeless crisis in 2017, but we’re well and truly going backwards.
Remember that the number published today is almost certainly an underestimate. Almost every person I’ve spoken to on the frontline of the homelessness crisis says that local authorities are lousy at collecting data. Moreover, the figure is taken from a single night snapshot in the autumn, which can’t possibly capture the transitory nature of the life of rough sleepers, who often bounce between the outdoors and the hostel system.
Even if rough-sleeping numbers haven’t quite returned to pre-pandemic levels, the number of estimated homeless deaths has never been higher. In November, the ONS estimated that 741 homeless people died in England and Wales in 2021 – an increase of 54% since records began in 2013. In Scotland the picture was even bleaker. There were 222 homeless deaths identified, although the real figure is estimated to be 250; that’s around five homeless deaths a week. I fear these tragedies will only increase as the number of rough sleepers rises.
I say this every time I write a piece on this topic, but it’s worth pointing out again: we know the solution to rough sleeping, and it couldn’t be simpler. The Conservative government also knows this perfectly well because it did it during the 2020 lockdown, when the Everyone In initiative virtually ended rough sleeping by taking people off the streets into hotels and temporary accommodation. According to government figures, 37,000 people were helped into housing. It was effectively the largest trial of “housing first”, which, unlike the current approach to helping the homeless, houses people with no pre-conditions and provides support specific to people’s needs.
Housing first pilots show time and time again that the initiative works. A pilot in Manchester has helped 321 people into their own homes, and it boasts an 87% tenancy sustainment rate, a figure that is mirrored by housing first programmes around the world. Still, housing first will never work nationwide without a commitment to building enough social homes.
Rishi Sunak walked away from his predecessor’s commitment to build 300,000 homes a year, which the government hoped would create more “affordable” housing. It’s not a huge loss, as “affordable” is a relative term. I’m sure Jeff Bezos finds yachts affordable. The problem is that “affordable” homes can charge up to 80% of local market rents. Still, I suppose it was better than nothing. Now we only have platitudes from No 10. “Rishi does not believe in arbitrary, top-down numbers,” a statement from his team read. “What matters is helping councils to get local plans in place more quickly to deliver beautiful homes, which communities can support.” Meanwhile, the average rent for a two-bedroom socially rented property can be 30% cheaper than “affordable” rents, so one would think it would make more sense to build those instead, but we are currently demolishing more social housing than we are building.
Labour is not up for the challenge, either. Keir Starmer said his party wouldn’t get “the big chequebook out” if it wins the next election, and yet his party had promised to make social housing the “second largest form of tenure” behind home ownership – something that will require many large cheques because, as the National Housing Federation says, the number of people in need of social housing in Britain has reached 4.2 million.
Last year I spoke to Mary (not her real name), a beneficiary of a housing first pilot. Mary told me she’d lost count of the number of people she’d seen die on the streets over the years. “I saw one person get set on fire. I’ve seen people that have been kicked to death. I’ve seen people that I’m talking to one minute; the next minute, they’re dying of hypothermia. I’ve seen it all,” she said.
During one of her homeless stints, she became dependent on alcohol. “I used to go around with my empty bottle – and you know when people leave drinks on the streets when they’ve been in pubs, I was that bad I used to pour it in my own bottle and create my own cocktail. I wasn’t taking pride in my appearance or anything. I’d just had enough.” Mary eventually got a place of her own and became a full member of the housing precariat, staying in various privately rented houses all over her city.
The last place Mary lived in burned down after another resident left behind a lit cigarette. “I really did want to give up this time. I couldn’t do another two and a half years on the streets again. So I was all ready for giving up until housing first gave me this lifeline. Basically, they saved my life,” says Mary.
However, it’s a different story for most rough sleepers in need of help. Let’s imagine there’s a man called Bob. Unlike Mary, he doesn’t head to the streets because of trauma. Instead, like an increasing number of modern rough sleepers, Bob is a victim of the cost-of-living crisis. Rising inflation means he has to prioritise food and heating over rent, and he is evicted and left with nowhere to go. Bob develops a taste for cheap cider while sleeping rough; it kills time and protects him from the old black dog of depression.
On one night after months of struggling, the police arrest Bob after having a drunken scrap in a city centre. Bob is now mentally ill, an alcoholic and extremely vulnerable, but he gave his opponent a black eye, so the magistrates give him six weeks inside. Problem solved!
Except the Prison Service is not fit for purpose and Bob’s health gets worse. He doesn’t get sober and develops a taste for the drug spice, which is rife in prison and which he takes with him to the outside. But the prison thinks it has done its job and fails to communicate with housing services before his release, so Bob is back on the street. On his first night, he is approached by a friendly outreach team, who get him a bed for the night. He’s off the streets. Problem solved!
Except because Bob is three sheets to the wind all day, he gets refused entry to night shelters on many subsequent evenings, and when it comes to his local housing register, he doesn’t stand a chance. Bob’s whole existence is geared around survival; where his next meal will come from, where he’ll use a toilet or get his next fix. So Bob remains in perpetual crisis, rebounding from prison to hostels, squats, tents and doorways. Bob doesn’t exist, but elements of his story apply to almost every homeless death I have reported on over the years.
If we’re going to avoid creating more Bobs, the government must restart the Everyone In initiative in the short term, and then commit to plugging the widening social housing gap in the longer term. If it doesn’t act immediately and treat rough sleeping as the human-rights emergency that it is, then more people will perish on our streets this year. That is blood on this government’s hands.
Daniel Lavelle writes on mental health, homelessness and social care
