It’s a sight that’s too familiar — the homeless person slumped in a shop door or stretched out in a dirty sleeping bag. Some of the begging signs are worn by familarity, though one enterprising example I saw in Washington read simply “I also take Venmo” (the US payments app). But the message is the same — rough sleepers are a sign of failure in our cities. More than 3,000 people are now recorded as sleeping rough in the capital, a 14 per cent rise in the past year.
The Prince of Wales this week launched his five-year Homewards programme aimed at fixing a problem which shames us all. The instinctive response might well be an eye-roll at royals with palatial residences promising real change.
But the Prince’s push, working with six locations nationwide, aims to make the phenomenon “rare, brief and unrepeated” — and that’s the right approach.
The profile of those sleeping on our streets has shifted since the pandemic to new categories of rough sleepers, such as youngsters vulnerable to a spiral of drugs, alcohol dependency and sexual exploitation. More people added to their ranks are in their twenties or middle age, who lost control of their budgets and were evicted from housing as cost-of-living woes have deepened.
This initiative matters for a couple of reasons. The first is that while royal backing is no magic wand, it becomes a lot harder for governments to skimp on emergency housing relief or let their focus wander from the task if the heir to the throne is exercised enough about it to make it a priority cause. And the Prince’s reputation is now on the line for this, as well as the next prime minister, whoever that may be. The Government’s own strategy, published in 2022, promised a joined-up approach to prevent people getting onto the streets, help them if they do and then sustain their recovery — with £2 billion attached and a target for largely banishing the problem by the end of 2025.
That is a target that is certain to be missed — and blaming the economic turbulence of the last year is not a good enough excuse. More encouraging is that both the main parties and the Prince agree that schemes which offer faster routes back to housing, on the model of Finland’s international success in whittling down the numbers of people affected, is encouraging,
As a policy journalist I learnt to suspect miraculous breakthroughs but the Finnish example is inspiring
As a former policy journalist I learned to be suspicious of miraculous breakthroughs. Likewise the easy assumption that everything in public services is better than in Britain or that deep-seated problems could be dealt with by advocating for a French healthcare system or Scandinavian welfare. Societies — and big cities — differ culturally as well as politically. Some solutions are more workable in one place than another.
Yet the Finnish example is inspiring. The short version is that it is focused on getting people off the streets into housing as fast as possible. Given that so many people in this position have drug and alcohol problems (and there will be more of them the longer they are homeless), the “joined-up” part of Findland’s Housing First programme is that it has a clear focus, rather than a muddle of competing ideas.
In essence, it replaces hostels and shelters with permanent housing, including rental contracts — with addiction counselling and welfare-to-work services attached.
Spending money on the homeless is not popular — and is especially distrusted among lower income groups. The Helsinki initiative, however, has run for long enough to show credible savings over more piecemeal solutions, which largely mutes domestic opposition.
What it needs is, unsurprisingly, a better and faster supply of social housing. No amount of well-designed pilot schemes can work without more low-cost homes. And that is a subject on which Londoners should be vociferous in testing both parties’ claims as election year looms. The capital needs more housing supply for many reasons. But a growing population living rough on its streets is a depressing spectacle and disastrous for those at the sharp end of politicians dithering.
Because Prince William will stick with the task, others will be less apt to neglect it. And if it takes a royal to shine a light into the huddles in doorways of department stores and under the city’s best-known bridges, good for him for taking notice and reminding us to do so too.
