UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1116-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER:

HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE

 

 

HOMELESSNESS

 

 

Tuesday 26 October 2004

PROFESSOR SUZANNE FITZPATRICK and MR NICHOLAS PLEACE

MR ADAM SAMPSON and MR PATRICK SOUTH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 74

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister:

Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee

on Tuesday 26 October 2004

Members present

Andrew Bennett, in the Chair

Sir Paul Beresford

Mr Clive Betts

Chris Mole

Mr Bill O'Brien

Mr Adrian Sanders

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Director, and Mr Nicholas Pleace, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome everyone to the first session of the Committee's inquiry into homelessness. Before I turn to the witnesses can I just draw to everybody's attention the fact that the written evidence we have received so far is now available from the Stationery Office at some large price which I cannot quite find at the moment ‑ £20.50 ‑ which does not seem to me to be very good value for money. It is available, but much cheaper of course, on the House of Commons web site. So if you want to find out what other people have said there is your opportunity to go and look at it. May I express the Committee's gratefulness to all those people who have put in evidence. May I ask the two of you to introduce yourselves for the record please.

Professor Fitzpatrick: I am Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Director of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York.

Mr Pleace: Nicholas Pleace, Senior Research Fellow at the CHP at the University of York.

Q2 Chairman: Looking at the faces of people at the back no‑one could hear that so could you speak up. I am afraid the acoustics in this room are not very good. The devices in front of you do not help the people in the room. I think they may help the broadcast but they do not help them, so if you could speak up that would be helpful. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy to go straight into questions?

Professor Fitzpatrick: We are happy to go straight to questions.

Chairman: Right. Bill O'Brien?

Q3 Mr O'Brien: Could I put it to you that the underlying causes of homelessness is an issue that gives rise to concern in many areas and you point out that the headline figure for homelessness ‑ local authority acceptances ‑ is at a record high and the trend has been upward for a long time. Aside from housing supply, what are the main factors underlying this rising demand in terms of demographics, changing social patterns and so on?

Professor Fitzpatrick: The upward trend is actually fairly recent in that in the pattern in homelessness acceptances in England there was a very rapid rise in the late 1980s/early 1990s, then there was a drop in the 1990s and it slowly started to rise again since around 1997. I think in terms of long‑term upward rises in homelessness they have been going on since the early 1980s through a combination of factors. The increase of poverty and unemployment, particularly in the late 1980s, was very closely linked with the rises in homelessness and the evolving restructuring of family relationships. We know that relationship breakdown, both for women and particularly for young people, is very closely associated with homelessness. In terms of the very recent rise since about 1997 onwards, it looks like housing market factors are most important in terms of the trend upwards, although not necessarily in terms of the overall causes of homelessness because the rate of homelessness was already running quite high.

Q4 Mr O'Brien: When you refer to increase in poverty what evidence do you have on that? What kind of poverty are you referring to, economic poverty or other factors?

Professor Fitzpatrick: To give you perhaps the clearest example, there was a very, very strong relationship between the rapid rise in youth homelessness in the late 1980s and the changes in the Social Security Act 1986 which made it more difficult for young people to gain access to Income Support and for 16 and 17-year-olds it caused severe hardship. That is a clear example where a particular economic change, a social security change has a demonstrable impact on homelessness, and from research I have done myself with young people that was very clear.

Q5 Mr O'Brien: What about people in employment, do we see poverty in that sector?

Professor Fitzpatrick: From the evidence we do have of homeless households, which is not complete and that is something we might go on to talk about the need for greater evidence, it suggests quite strongly that the great majority of homeless households in recent years have been unemployed and that is across single homeless households and families. There will be some families in particular where there is someone in employment but on most occasions the research evidence, such as it is tells, us that they are unemployed. That was not the case, as far as we know, in the 1960s and 1970s; it has been case, as I say, in the 1980s.

Q6 Mr O'Brien: In your evidence you say "to what extent is homelessness attributable to housing market failures or to more complex social exclusion dynamics?" You ask that question; have you got the answer to that?

Mr Pleace: We think it is a combination of factors really. I suppose our central thesis from the research that we have done over the years is that people who are characterised by what is called "social exclusion" or "socio‑economic marginalisation" (in terms of exclusion from education when young and not being likely to be in employment and tending to be quite socially and politically marginalised) tend to be the population who are over‑represented in the homeless population. Our research evidence I think shows that that section of society which is socio‑economically marginalised tends to be the section of society that is affected by wider structural forces such as housing market change or labour market change.

Q7 Chairman: The number of 16 and 17‑year‑olds is actually going down, is it not, in the population?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think that is right, I am not certain.

Q8 Chairman: So if you are saying it is an increasing problem that things are actually getting much worse, are they not, for 16 and 17‑year‑olds?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think we do have to refer to the changes that there have been in the legislation which provide priority need status for 16 and 17‑year‑olds who did not have it previously. The fact that those numbers are going up does not necessarily mean that the number of young people in that age group who are becoming homeless has risen. It may have done but in all likelihood the numbers who are homeless in that age group are becoming more visible in the statistics because they now have priority need status which they did not have before. So I do not think we would take issue on that point.

Q9 Mr Sanders: In terms of the trends in homelessness we know that acceptances peaked in 1991 and then showed some decline in the early 1990s before they started to rise again. What actually happened in the early 1990s that led to an improvement?

Professor Fitzpatrick: The numbers peaked in 1991 at an exceptionally high level so what you had there was the impact of what had happened in the late 1980s where, for example, as I said before, the numbers of young homeless people really catapulted from the mid‑1980s position. I think what you had after 1991 was something of a plateau-ing effect and then a gentle drop but it was quite a shallow drop and it started to lift again. I think one of the things that happened in the mid‑1990s, of course, was the Homeless Act 1996 which restricted homeless persons' entitlements under the homeless legislation. While we cannot be certain, it seems likely that that had some disincentive effect on people coming forward to gain access to housing under the Act because their entitlements were restricted, so I think some of the shallowing out in the mid‑1980s was probably attributable to the legislation. Other than that it was a plateau-ing off of what was an extreme increase in late 1980s.

Q10 Mr Sanders: So would the reverse be true of the current upward trend as a consequence of the more recent Housing Act?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I am sorry, could you say that again?

Q11 Mr Sanders: Is the reverse true with the more recent Housing Act that has widened priority groups? Is that now behind the trend in the other direction?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I had a look at the statistics on this and because the statistics break the priority need groups down into their constituent parts it looks like there is an upward trend not just in relation to the new groups but also the existing priority groups, in other words, homeless families and older vulnerable people, and so on. So while one-third of the increase looks as if it is attributable to new groups, about two‑thirds of it is attributable to the existing groups. It looks as if there is an underlying upward trend. Some of it can be attributed to the new priority need groups but not all of it.

Q12 Mr Sanders: Is that trend continuing or do you think it is now complete?

Professor Fitzpatrick: It is difficult to say. In the last two or three quarters it looks like it has flattened out but it is difficult to say, I think, without looking at this in the slightly longer run as to whether it is going to plateau out and start to dip or it is just plateau-ing rather than dipping or rising in the last two or three quarters. It has been rising pretty steadily until about a year or so ago and it is still just flattening out.

Mr Pleace: It is important to bear in mind that acceptances measure one thing, which is approaches to local authorities, and something else is happening as well which is an increase in the use and level of temporary accommodation where there is a steeper upward curve. We have got that pattern as well. The only thing I would add is that in terms of the pattern of acceptances our feeling is that there are quite important regional variations in terms of how that is patterning out in terms of what you see in London compared to cities in the Midlands and the North.

Q13 Mr Sanders: You often hear that there is regional variation but in the housing market there are more commonalities in similar economic and social entities between regions, for example, rural areas, for example big cities (although there is not necessarily a big city in every region) and for example coastal resorts, and they all exhibit similar characteristics across regions, so when you look at the regional statistics there is this rather greater commonality. I do not know whether you agree that we might be missing something by looking at things in regions?

Mr Pleace: If you are talking about the North East and South West it is probably too aggregated to see the kind of effects that you are talking about but some recent work we have done for ODPM in a feasibility study on family homes suggests a correlation between the degree of housing stress and the extent of temporary accommodation. You can draw two graphs and if you look at those localities which are characterised by housing stress ‑ this is at the level of individual authorities ‑ then they tend to be areas that have greater use of temporary accommodation. Regional effects is probably not the way to talk about it. It is specific area effects and linked to things like housing markets, labour markets and other local factors which we think alter the pattern of homelessness in terms of small‑scale homelessness.

Q14 Sir Paul Beresford: There is a tendency in this country for university under‑graduates to leave home and rent accommodation. They presumably absorb a considerably proportion of university town private accommodation that is available. Is this a factor here perhaps compared to Europe?

Professor Fitzpatrick: Not as far as I am aware. I do not know of any work which suggests that homelessness is higher in university towns than it is elsewhere. I would not suggest that was the case.

Q15 Sir Paul Beresford: Commonsense would tell you if you have got tens of thousands of students using accommodation, even five to a house, there would be a housing shortage.

Professor Fitzpatrick: We need to look at the complexity of causes of homelessness. I do not think it is as straightforward as one particular housing demand group driving homelessness. In so far as housing market factors underline levels of homelessness, it is about the balance between supply and demand, so there are circumstances where supply might respond to that particular demand and in other cases where it might not. I do not think it is necessarily down to any one demand group. Our other central thesis, which I think does have an important regional variation, and which is based on qualitative research that we have done (we are hoping that ODPM will commission a quantitative survey soon which will give us some rigorous statistical information on this) is that the balance of causes of homelessness is likely to differ depending on structural factors. In some cases we believe, based on the work that we have done, housing stress and housing demand pressures of various kinds are particularly important in driving homelessness. London is a key example of that but there are others. However, in other places where there is excess housing and low demand for housing you still have high rates of homelessness. I think an interesting question is why do we still have high levels of homelessness in those areas? In those places there are drivers which include the social dislocations associated with poverty and unemployment and they tend to be driving homelessness. The important thing about that is that it then changes the complexity of the homeless population that you are dealing with and changes what the appropriate interventions should be. That is why we think looking at homelessness within a local context and what the particular drivers are in those cases is so important and in some instances, perhaps, demand from particular groups like students will be particularly important but I cannot say it is a factor that I have particularly come across in the work that I have done.

Q16 Chairman: You are saying that the problems of homelessness are very different in different parts of the country?

Professor Fitzpatrick: Yes, that would be our hypothesis.

Mr Pleace: Very quickly just to restate that and to summarise it, in some areas, for example areas of high housing stress, we would expect a bigger proportion of the homeless population to become homeless simply for economic factors. So for example where housing costs are very high and a household loses one of its wage earners, for whatever reason, it might not then be able to afford to pay the rent and thus become homeless. In areas where there is not the same degree of housing stress it might be that the homeless population is characterised by higher levels of need because in some senses it is harder to become homeless in areas where housing costs are low and where social housing is relatively plentiful. Where households become homeless in that context it might mean that there are factors like support needs and like the kinds of social dislocation that Professor Fitzpatrick is talking about that become more important in those areas.

Q17 Chairman: Can I take you on to temporary accommodation. In fact the numbers in temporary accommodation have doubled, have they not, in the last six years? Is that going to double again in the next six years?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think we would want to be cautious about predictions but one of the things that we have come across in looking at statistics and looking at the associations between levels of homelessness and various indicators of homelessness is a very strong correlation between the numbers of people in temporary accommodation and various indicators of housing stress, particularly affordability problems, so in other words those areas of the country in which housing is in greatest demand and is most difficult to access there is a much stronger relationship with the numbers of people in temporary accommodation than there is with some of the numbers necessarily coming forward and being accepted as homeless. It looks like the main association between housing stress and homelessness is the difficulty that there is in moving people on from temporary accommodation. Some research that Nicholas has done recently has shown a very close correlation between Professor Steve Wilcox's (with whom we work) indicators of housing affordability and the rates of use of temporary accommodation in various parts of the country. I think that is one indicator which is going to be very strongly associated with housing stress

Q18 Chairman: So you are suggesting that temporary accommodation is really a measure of housing stress. What is wrong with temporary accommodation in itself?

Mr Pleace: It depends what kind of temporary accommodation you are talking about. For the most part local authorities use ordinary housing under various arrangements. There are particular problems around some forms of temporary accommodation used in some local authorities. You will all be aware of families being placed in bed and breakfast and recent government actions around that. There are other forms of temporary accommodation which may be inappropriate in terms of location, size, design and the range of amenities that they offer. Thus some hostel accommodation which might be used for some households might be inappropriate. Some areas that are characterised by high housing stress are not necessarily cities, they are rural localities that have relatively few people in temporary accommodation but there are difficulties in moving those households on. You might find that a rural local authority has a homeless hostel which accommodates both single homeless people and is also sometimes used for families, and that accommodation might be inappropriate for a range of reasons because, for example, there might be an undesirable mix of people in terms of the range of needs that they have got if there are children present in that accommodation.

Q19 Chairman: How much temporary accommodation is poor quality or unsuitable?

Mr Pleace: It is difficult to say in some respects. There has not been systematic research on that since some work was done by Pat Niner in 1989 which did suggest a range of problems within temporary accommodation. For the most part the temporary accommodation used by local authorities is housing. The degree to which that housing is of an acceptable standard is going to be affected by a range of things. There are issues around size. Quite often groups such as homeless families become homeless with very few resources, so a woman escaping domestic violence with her children might take flight very suddenly which means she has no financial services, she has no furniture, and she has no white goods. Providing her with an unfurnished temporary house might not be a very satisfactory solution but a local authority may be in a position where it is only able to do that and only in time able to equip that house. So it is a function of size, suitability of location, is there somewhere safe for the children to play, is there somewhere safe to let the children out? Is it a safe environment if it is a vulnerable person who has been accepted because they have mental health problems? Is the locality going to affect their well‑being? There are all kinds of environmental factors, things around space, things around amenities within the accommodation.

Q20 Chairman: Some temporary accommodation is both totally unsuitable and expensive so in financial terms it would make better sense for local authorities to try to find permanent accommodation rather than temporary accommodation?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think it is fair to say that there have been significant achievements in respect of reducing the use of bed and breakfast. Obviously the priority has been for families but there has also been a very recent reduction in its use for all households, and that is very welcome.

Q21 Chairman: Perhaps the bed and breakfast has just declined and other temporary accommodation has increased to balance it out?

Professor Fitzpatrick: The other temporary accommodation that tends to have increased is use of private sector leasing and use of local authorities' own accommodation. As Nicholas said, we do not have complete information on a large scale and systematic basis about how satisfactory that is but the qualitative information we have suggests that that type of ordinary housing used as temporary accommodation is much cheaper and it seems to be far more satisfactory. You asked why it is such a problem in the South. Part of the problem in the South is because bed and breakfast does tend to be used more so than it is elsewhere in the country. Overwhelmingly in the northern cities, for example, local authorities use their own stock or RSL stock to accommodate families. From what we know, which is qualitative, that is much better than bed and breakfast. There are other forms of temporary accommodation which are used and the figures on this are fairly steady, things like women refuges and hostels and so on. It is patchy but some of that accommodation is excellent and gives people the breathing space and support that they need to move on. We must not think of temporary accommodation as always being a bad thing. In some instances where it is suitable and provides the support that people need and it is not for too long a period it can be very valuable, including for some young people. What we want to get away from is very protracted periods in poor quality and inappropriate bed and breakfast and other forms of mixed hostels for families and single people because what we know is that is often felt to be very unsafe for children for example. One of the key points that has emerged recently, certainly in Scotland and in England, is that permanent accommodation can sometimes be at least as much of a problem as temporary accommodation. In other words, families and other people in temporary accommodation can be reluctant to move out because the permanent accommodation they are being offered, thinking particularly of the North rather than London and the South East, in the larger urban areas, is so poor and in areas in which they feel so unsafe. The permanent can be worse than the temporary. I think that is an important point to get across but, again, it is a very regionally and locally differentiated point.

Q22 Mr Betts: To come back to regional differences, first of all in London, is London just an extreme case that simply reflects what the rest of the country goes through only to a greater degree or is it very different indeed in terms of homelessness?

Professor Fitzpatrick: It is very different indeed. I think London is a unique case within Britain. We have some areas where there are parallels with New York for example but within Britain London is very different. There are all manner of reasons why London is different. To pick out two of the key issues, London is unusual in having a co‑existence of a very high housing stress level and very high levels of poverty. Most parts of the country tend to have one or the other. Existing research evidence suggests that both are strong causes of homelessness. In London you have both co‑existing and I think that makes not just the absolute numbers but, as you will see from the statistics, the proportionate numbers, the rate at which people living in London become homeless much higher than anywhere else in the country. The rates of long‑term stay in temporary accommodation are also exceptionally high. The recent work done by the Audit Commission suggests that people spend 22 weeks on average in bed and breakfast in London as compared to seven weeks elsewhere in the country. You are talking about extreme difficulties moving people on from temporary accommodation.

Mr Pleace: To add one statistic there, one of the things we looked at in recent work was the average number of families in temporary accommodation for each family that was accepted during the course of 2002. If you look at the North East, the North West and the Midlands there is roughly on average one family in temporary accommodation for each new family that is accepted. In London there are eight families in temporary accommodation for each new family that is accepted.

Q23 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you think this is adequately reflected in the government grant to local authorities in London?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I am afraid we have not looked at that in detail so we could not comment on that.

Q24 Mr Betts: In terms of the North you indicated that you think economic factors predominate in why people become homeless but the economy has been getting a lot better in the last few years. Why has that situation occurred? There are more empty homes in many of the northern areas and we have also got a lot more jobs so why has homelessness gone up? I cannot put the two together.

Professor Fitzpatrick: The important thing in terms of looking at homelessness in the North in particular, and as I said earlier it is complex, (and it more obvious why there is homelessness in areas of high housing stress; I think it is more challenging to look at why they become homeless elsewhere) is that to describe the causes as economic does not capture the complexity of what we are talking about. I think it is something that is probably better expressed as "social exclusion". It is the extent to which people are falling behind the rest of society rather than the straightforward issue of not being able to buy housing or not being able to afford housing in those areas. I think it is the fact of low status, low self‑esteem, the social problems that are attendant upon living in very deprived areas, and the restrictions of life chances that are associated with that. While the economy has improved across the country and levels of employment have increased and so on ‑ and that is very welcome ‑ we all know there are areas that have been left behind and while we do not have good geographically discrete information on this yet I am hoping that the ODPM-commissioned study will allow us to test the hypothesis that levels of homelessness are very heavily concentrated in what the Government used to call the worst deprived estates. I think that is where concentrated levels of homelessness are. It is to do with social exclusion of people living in those areas. I do not think that has been fully reached by the rising prosperity, for instance, of society. In fact, it could be made worse because of the relativity factors.

Mr Pleace: The existing qualitative research does suggest an association between sustained experience of compound disadvantage and experience of homelessness. We cannot go to the point now because we do not have the evidence to suggest that there might be things like inter‑generational homelessness happening. We do not have strong enough evidence to think about that but certainly if you look, for example, at Suzanne's work on young homeless people and some of the other work that has been done on young homeless people they come disproportionately from very marginalised backgrounds and are likely not to be in employment, education or training when they reach their teenage years. We are talking about a subset of a population which because they are in a state and to such a degree of compound disadvantage then wider economic prosperity is harder for them to access. It does not trickle down to them in the same way it does to other sectors of the population.

Q25 Chris Mole: You welcome the Government's intention to have a step change in housing supply in the South East, especially in the growth areas, but how do you think it is going to help in the districts with the highest demand, most of which is not in the growth areas?

Professor Fitzpatrick: There are two things going on. One is that high housing stress overall squeezes those at the bottom of the housing market and they find it increasingly difficult to access accommodation. Therefore, if you were to manage to ease housing pressures across the South that would feed through, we believe, to improving the ability to move people on from temporary accommodation. That said, whether any particular housing developments will in a very direct sense enable the housing of the homeless does depend to a large extent on where it is and whether it is where the housing demand comes from. What we know from a lot of research that ourselves and other people have done is that most homeless people are very local and most homeless people present as homeless where they live and that is where they want to continue to be. We are not entirely sure whether that is true in London because London, again, is very different from everywhere else. For example, it has high levels of inward migration. It is difficult to envisage that the increasing step change in housing supply will not help but the extent to which it will reach those in greatest need is something that we need to monitor over time.

Q26 Chris Mole: There is no specific evidence that a higher rate of general house‑building would make a difference to homelessness?

Professor Fitzpatrick: It is not a question that is amenable to very straightforward answers. It is something where you have to wait and see and where you probably have to do some quite sophisticated modelling which we have not done as yet. It is the sort of question that is probably best responded to by commentators like Steve Wilcox who looks at the macro level housing market and affordability questions. What we are looking at instead is the effects of that and the micro-level impacts of it.

Mr Pleace: I suppose I would qualify that slightly. If our hypothesis is right, which is that some homelessness is economic and not being able to afford housing and the other kind of homelessness is more linked to support need, experience of disadvantage and things like that, you might find a situation where different sectors ‑ and I am speaking hypothetically ‑ of the homeless population might benefit at different levels from house building. Where there is a straightforward economic causation of homelessness people are homeless because they cannot afford current market rents or mortgages or something like that, you would expect that the simple provision of affordable housing would make a difference to that group. Where people are homeless because they have got health needs, support needs and other issues which might undermine their capacity to sustain a tenancy on their own for example, straightforward provision of housing might not assist that group. It would indirectly because obviously one of their problems is that they have not got somewhere affordable to live but it might not be in itself enough to guarantee a sustained exit from homelessness.

Q27 Chris Mole: Can I ask you to speculate on whether the benefits of more general house‑building filter down the system or whether it would be the right approach to make more direct social housing provision to really help the poorest people?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think this question is related to a broader argument that is based on the evidence that we have that the balance in those two groups that Nicholas was describing is different in different parts of the country. We do not have (and no‑one has) direct quantitative evidence of what the balance of homeless people's support needs are in different parts of the country. Once the ODPM have conducted the survey that we have mentioned then we should have better evidence on that. Our hypothesis in the meantime is that that housing need only group is going to be proportionately, as well as absolutely, larger in the South because housing market affordability factors are more central to the levels of homelessness. Based on that we would argue logically that it seems very likely that easing housing market shortages in the South will help a lot of homeless people in the South. That said, there is a continuing issue about whether the increase in housing supply is in the right place. If homelessness is a very local issue that might blunt the impact of increasing the overall supply if it is not in the right places in the South. I think that is something that we would need to examine in the light of evidence as the housing comes on stream to see what people's behaviour is.

Q28 Chris Mole: You talked in your written submission about residential segregation into ever more homogenous communities, and people with choice putting as much distance as possible between themselves and poorer people. Does this mean that policies in favour of more mixed sustainable communities have failed?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think it is very, very difficult because the process of residential segregation has been happening for decades, so what you are doing is trying to swim against the tide with policies that promote mixed communities. Because I think new house‑building accounts for less than one per cent of all new housing stock in any particular year, if you are promoting mixed communities through section 106 and through pepper-potting the social rented sector with other forms of housing, I think that is a very positive policy, but it is going to be a long-term process to change nature of the housing stock I think wherever possible policy should do all that it can to create mixed communities but I do not think that anybody should think it is going to be an easy and a quick fix because it is a long‑term process we are trying to reverse.

Q29 Chairman: You have almost suggested that mixed communities are being segregated by people's choice. Is that right?

Professor Fitzpatrick: I think that is right. There is a dilemma for policy in that we have an increasingly marketised housing sector and we have had for a long time with owner‑occupation increasing. We also have policies whereby we wish to allow greater choice for people in the social rented sector with quasi market principles being introduced there as well. I can see good reasons for that. Everyone wants choice nowadays and why should poor people not have it as well. I think at the same time we have to be very clear and very honest about what the costs of those choices are. Because the choices that people make tend to be to live among people like themselves, and if they are the sort of people who have choice and are more advantaged, then there are costs of that and the costs are social justice ones borne by those people who do not have as much choice. I think it is a dilemma but from a social justice point of view it is very important, wherever possible, to promote mixed communities. The more we introduce choice and the more we emphasise choice within the housing market the more the natural tendency will be towards segregation and there is very, very strong statistical evidence on that now. The 2001 Census, recently analysed by Danny Dollan (?), has shown that the tendency towards residential segregation has increased over the last ten years. Just in the same way it did in the 1980s it has done over the 1990s. It is a real dilemma and a very difficult one for social policy.

Q30 Mr Betts: Do you think we should change the legislation and go more towards the Scottish system of giving permanent accommodation to everyone who becomes homeless?

Professor Fitzpatrick: If what we are interested in doing is providing a secure safety net for all homeless people then that would be the sensible way to go. Local authorities are the only bodies in the position to take on that responsibility of ensuring that every homeless person has access to housing. That said, the Scottish approach is fairly radical not just within Britain but in the western world in terms of providing a comprehensive safety net to all homeless groups rather than just certain priority groups. I would not want to under‑estimate the difficulty in moving the English legislation in that direction because local authorities in many parts of the country would, quite rightly, argue that they do not have the housing stock and they do not have the access to RSL stock that would enable them to fulfil those obligations. One is one element of the Scottish approach which is very helpful is that it is a phased expansion of priority need allied with periodic assessments of local authorities' ability to cope. For that reason I think it would be interesting for England to keep a close eye on how Scottish local authorities are coping because while Scottish local authorities, if you take Scotland as a whole, have a higher proportion of social rented stock than England (it is still running at about 30 per cent) these obligations are also being imposed on local authorities in Scotland which have very low levels of social rented stock. Rural areas of Scotland have no more social housing stock than a lot of areas in England. So I think a careful localised look of what is happening in Scotland would be very useful. If we want ‑ and personally of course I would like to see this - a secure safety net for all homeless people then I think it would be the direction to move in, with a careful eye on local authorities' capacity to cope. Another important point in the Scottish system which I do not think I have mentioned in the paper is that with stock transfer - and people are probably aware of the Glasgow stock transfer which was very major but there have been other stock transfers in Scotland as well ‑ part of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001 imposed a duty on RSLs to accommodate homeless households referred to them by local authorities. It would be very difficult to impose a duty in England on local authorities to accommodate homeless households without a similar provision tying in RSLs.

Q31 Mr Betts: I also had the point made to me from people in my constituency who have got sons and daughters on the waiting list for a house, that if you are more generous in what you offer to homeless households you increase people's likelihood of becoming homeless in some cases because rather than wait ten or 15 years on the waiting list the only way to get priority for a home in a nice area (if authorities are prepared to allocate homeless families a cross‑section of their housing stock) is to become homeless and indeed if you become homeless then to wait and see if you get a nice property before deciding whether you are going to take it up. Is there any evidence of that?

Professor Fitzpatrick: It is a complex one. I have looked at this point in detail recently for another piece of work for ODPP. Homelessness agencies and academics would argue that there is no evidence of that but it has to be said that nobody has looked very hard for the evidence of that in the homelessness world. I think that it would be difficult to argue that there is not some kind of incentive effect within the homeless legislation but, that said, I think it is very important to keep it in context, to keep it in perspective. The very extensive qualitative evidence we have about homeless families and others who go through the homelessness process is that they try very hard to find other solutions before they present themselves to local authorities, by and large. The other piece of key evidence that we have is that the homeless persons legislation ‑ I have done quite extensive work on this ‑ does act as a very good proxy for those in the greatest housing need. We do not have solid evidence of deliberately making yourself homeless in order to gain access to council housing but that is not the same as arguing it never happens. The evidence that we do have suggests that it is not the key factor which drives homelessness and it is also what the intentionality provisions are intended to capture. It is the reason why in Scotland priority need is going to gradually be abolished and the connection is going to be suspended but intentionality has been kept to address that particular issue.

Q32 Mr Betts: Is there any research into monitoring what happens in different authorities with different policies and approaches?

Professor Fitzpatrick: In term of intentionality particularly?

Q33 Mr Betts: In terms of what stock they are prepared to offer homeless families, whether it is the readily available poorest stock or whether they offer a range of different provision.

Professor Fitzpatrick: We know that there are one-offer only policies in many parts of both England and Scotland. Other local authorities with more extensive/low-demand housing stock tend to be more generous in that respect, so we know there is quite a variety.

Chairman: Sorry to interrupt but we are running a bit late. We have got two more topics we want to cover so could we have very short answers please. Chris Mole?

Q34 Chris Mole: What is your view of the success of the Supporting People programme in helping homeless people?

Mr Pleace: The very short answer is it is too early to say. The existing evidence base on Supporting People is not as strong as it could be. There has not been a great deal of research done on floating support services like tenancy sustainment. There is not a great deal of research being done on supportive housing solutions which move people on in terms of looking at the long‑term impact in terms of sustained exits from homelessness. All the research that CHP has done, and the research done by other people which has looked at various forms of supported housing or floating support to homeless households, does show that it has a general beneficial effect in terms of helping people who would otherwise be unable to sustain a tenancy or whose tenancy would be at risk following homelessness because there might be issues around their short‑term coping skills. A particular issue for homeless people and homeless families as well is wider engagement with the welfare state. You are talking about sometimes quite marginalised populations who might find it difficult to articulate themselves and who may not know where to go. Housing-related support funded by Supporting People seems to have a very significant role in relation to registration with a GP, ensuring that the range of benefits to which a household is entitled is being claimed and ensuring that they have got access to the other kinds of service that they need. That kind of low-level support to assist and engage with a range of services is very important and also it can be very significant in terms of where a household is quite marginalised, quite inarticulate, quite alienated (as some homeless households are) in that they can help that household engage with the social landlord.

Q35 Chris Mole: What would be examples of successful innovation in this area which you could share?

Mr Pleace: The main one we have worked on is the Shelter Homeless to Home project which was a pilot project which we evaluated which provided a low‑intensity floating support service to homeless families who were characterised by vulnerability. These were quite often families who had experienced recurrent homelessness, and had been homeless two or three times before. That low‑intensity support level service, which was characterised by being highly flexible in terms of the range of support that it could offer, helped with everything from helping households decorate their property through to low‑level emotional support, helping households access benefits, helping households access other services that they needed. It showed that that kind of service could be effective. Actually it was one of the first pieces of research that showed the extent to which homeless families might be characterised by some of the support needs that we also associate with homelessness.

Q36 Chris Mole: What would you say about the quality of services for people living in institutional settings who become homeless? What contribution is there from those services to reduce the "revolving door" for repeat homelessness?

Mr Pleace: We have done a lot of work around looked after children and there has been a lot of innovation and support because we know about the strong over‑representation of looked after children. That is not Supporting People because they are too young to be funded under that programme. However there is work on youth homelessness and work on former offenders and things like that, and we have got a big assumption within public policy at the moment which is that anybody who has come from an institutional setting is going to have fewer coping skills because they have been in that institutional setting. We have got some evidence around youth homeless services that have been effective interventions. There is not a great deal of research around services to former offenders. There is some evidence suggesting that perhaps there is an association between being in the armed forces and homelessness for which, again, there is no strong evidence. But beyond youth homelessness we have not really got much evidence around institutional services.

Q37 Mr O'Brien: Finally, can we ask about data collection and the understanding of data. Some people suggest that it only benefits academics like yourselves but other people are calling for improvements in data collection. What do you think are the main deficiencies at the present time?

Mr Pleace: The main deficiency in P1E is that P1E measures decisions by local authorities but it does not really record the characteristics of the households that are becoming homeless. We do not know very much at all about the composition of those households because it is not really recorded in any detail, unlike the Scottish system, HL1, which does collect basic information on a household‑by‑household basis. The data we have got is the monitoring of two things. It is the monitoring of the decisions that local authorities take and it is an account conducted on a quarterly basis of how many households are in temporary accommodation.

Chairman: Right, on that note can I thank you very much for your evidence.

Witnesses: Mr Adam Sampson, Director, and Mr Patrick South, Deputy Director, Campaigns and Communication, Shelter, examined.

Q38 Chairman: May I welcome you to the second session this morning of the Committee's inquiry into homelessness and ask you to identify yourselves for the record.

Mr Sampson: My name is Adam Sampson and I am the Director of Shelter.

Mr South: I am Patrick South, Deputy Director of Communication and Campaigns at Shelter.

Q39 Chairman: Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight into questions?

Mr Sampson: Just very briefly, first of all we are grateful for the opportunity to give verbal evidence to supplement our written evidence. Our general approach to this is informed by a recognition of some of the very welcome improvements and advances that have taken place on homelessness and homelessness policy over the past few years - the driving down of the number of people sleeping on the streets, the very welcome ending of the use of bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless families with children. Those things are achievements of which government should be proud. Set against that, however, there are long‑term structural issues which do cause us considerable concern. We have the rise that has already been alluded to in the use of temporary accommodation and for increasing periods of time and more pertinently we also have structural difficulties in the housing market nationally which will in our judgment, if not tackled to a greater extent than at the moment there seem to be plans to do, only exacerbate long‑term issues to do with homelessness. Those are our major concerns.

Chairman: Thank you very much. Clive Betts?

Q40 Mr Betts: You say in your evidence that there are lots of different measures of homelessness none of which provide a complete picture, particularly the official measure of people who are unintentionally homeless and in priority need. What is the complete picture, how serious is it, and does the Government understand the seriousness?

Mr Sampson: Frankly, if we knew the complete picture we would have said it. There is no central numerical account of the full picture of homelessness. Our criticism of the over‑reliance on the official figure about people accepted as homeless is that it merely reflects local authorities' judgments of one particular manifestation of homelessness. Those judgments themselves may be influenced to a significant degree by the fact that in accepting somebody as unintentionally homeless and in priority need local authorities are imposing on themselves a duty to do something about it, so, plainly, one may question the extent to which those judgments are unbiased. There are no reliable figures on the number of people who do not fall into those categories, the number of single homeless people for example, the hidden homeless, and so on and so forth. There is considerable debate within 200,000 or 300,000 as to what those numbers really are.

Q41 Mr Betts: So if government came to you and said, "Right, we are going to change the way we collect homelessness statistics, we are looking for your recommendation," what would it be?

Mr Sampson: It would be difficult for me to give a comprehensive answer at this point. Plainly, you would need to look at a very comprehensive and very complex set of measures. There are definitional issues which are important here. Homelessness is not a single manifestation; it may be rooflessness, it may be some other manifestation of housing need. One would need to engage in quite a complex process of determining what exactly constituted homelessness in the first place because homelessness and rooflessness are plainly not the same thing

Mr South: Can I follow that up? As part of your question you asked whether the Government has a full picture for understanding homelessness. I think the bit of government that deals with homelessness, the Homelessness Directorate, has made a lot of progress in terms of bed and breakfast, rough sleeping, et cetera, as Adam said. I think also the report that the Social Exclusion Unit published recently recognised that the numbers in temporary accommodation is one of the five key things holding back government progress on that agenda. The Child Poverty Review also recognised homelessness as part of the child poverty agenda. I think there are signs in government more widely that the homelessness issue is being recognised. I think the jury is still out in terms of the government taking that on as a big issue, and if we are to get to grips with the numbers in temporary accommodation the Homelessness Directorate cannot do that on their own. They need wider support from ODPM and political leadership from the top. There are signs that homelessness is being recognised but the jury is still out as to whether at the very top of government it is enough of a priority.

Q42 Mr Betts: I can see how you can get a measure of those people who present themselves as homeless or who are deemed to be potentially homeless because they are there and they are recorded. When you come down to young people who are not in a priority category or who do not present themselves because they are never going to get housing, there is no way of measuring that, is there?

Mr Sampson: There is not. It is a genuine problem and, frankly, neither Shelter nor anybody else has the answer. What I am anxious not to do here, though, is to get hung up on questions about whether the number of people in the category to which you just referred is genuinely 200,000 or 400,000, and it could be anywhere in that range. The truth remains that even if we knew how many there were there is nothing around in terms of government policy in the short‑term which is likely to meet their needs. Counting the needs may be a useful academic exercise but counting the needs completely disassociates it from any likelihood of meeting those needs. It seems to us to be a rather sterile exercise.

Q43 Mr Sanders: Your evidence shows that much of the increase in homelessness acceptances between 1996‑97 and 2003‑04 is homelessness caused by parents and friends "no longer able to accommodate". Why do you think these causes are of such growing importance?

Mr Sampson: That reflects again the analysis which is done at the point at which those individuals are accepted as homeless. I think that category masks a considerable complexity and richness about what is actually going on underneath it. Some of that may be genuine relationship breakdown with no other contingent causes. Some of that however may mask unacceptable levels of housing need. Giving you an example, there seems to be a considerable correlation between homelessness and overcrowding in some areas of the country, so you will have situations, say, in some parts of East London whereby you have three generations crammed into relatively small local authority accommodation, and under those circumstances it does not take very much in terms of family stress to create a situation where homelessness is caused. That may not be a manifestation of a dysfunctional family situation; it may be a manifestation of housing need which is then expressed through a claim "they will not let us stay in the house anymore" when the individual gets to the local authority homelessness unit, and therefore the response to that may need to vary quite widely. This brings us to some concerns about the preventative agenda (which we thoroughly support in principle) on the part of local authorities which, for example, forces mediation on a family in that situation. Where there is a genuine family breakdown and that could be repaired through mediation that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable approach to take.

Q44 Chairman: Even if the household is grossly overcrowded?

Mr Sampson: No that is exactly the point I was going to make. Where there is no gross overcrowding and it may be that there genuinely is a family breakdown then plainly mediation may well be the solution. Where in fact the real cause is overcrowding then to force people into mediation seems to us to be fundamentally misplaced.

Q45 Mr Sanders: Do you think there is sometimes collusion between parents and their offspring or between friends to get registered as homeless and so jump the housing list?

Mr Sampson: I think the answer that you were given in the evidence previously seems to us to reflect the reality of the situation. Of course in theory that may happen and I think everybody has to acknowledge the possibility of that happening. Where in practice you have a situation where having your name on the council housing list is not likely ever to produce a tenancy, one can see there may be some incentive to go the homeless route. On the other hand, we do not have any real evidence, as was referred to earlier, of that happening in any major way. Indeed, given the difficulties in getting accepted as homeless and given the fact that in areas of high housing demand you may well then have to endure unacceptably poor temporary accommodation for a considerable period of time and then get a letting which is hardly the most desirable in the world; the incentives are not as great as might otherwise be assumed.

Q46 Chris Mole: You have said the number of intentionally homeless decisions has more than doubled since 1997 and that some authorities may be interpreting intentionality very strictly to reduce the numbers they have to house. At the same time some neighbours think it is quite hard to get evictions by local authorities for anti‑social behaviour. What is reasonable behaviour by local authorities in this circumstance and what influences local authority behaviour in this area?

Mr South: Possibly the best answer to that question is to say that in terms of the work Shelter Services do, our advisers deal with an awful lot of intentionally homeless decisions and they are very often successful in overturning them. Anecdotally, some of our housing aid centres would say they overturn roughly 50 per cent of those decisions. Obviously that is not something that can happen across the board. That is only going to happen where Shelter has a service or there is another service in place to challenge those decisions. However, I think that degree of decisions being challenged and overturned gives some kind of indication that intentional homeless decisions are being made when they should not be. Legislation was originally introduced, as was referred to in the previous evidence, to act as a disincentive to stop people falsely applying as homeless. We think now that that evidence, particularly in the last couple of years where intentional homeless decisions have gone up by another 50 per cent (which does coincide with the introduction of legislation) that there is something that needs to be looked at that, particularly when you have got intentionality decisions being made because of previous criminal convictions or rent arrears because that is undermining the spirit of the legislation and is actually very much against the policy intentions of the Government.

Q47 Chris Mole: A housing authority is supposed to refer intentionally homeless families with children to social services. You have been critical of the response by some social services departments about what they should be doing. Given that it is clearly undesirable for children to be taken into care, what more should social services be doing for such families?

Mr South: Just to say first of all we are very grateful for the amendment you tabled in the committee on the Children Bill on that. It was a very interesting debate because you had all three political parties in a rare show of unity backing the case for housing to be part of that Bill and for much closer co‑operation between housing and the new children's services that that Bill will be introducing. What we are arguing in that situation is that there are duties currently on social services in that situation and they should be carrying out an assessment of the children's needs, and there are powers for them to provide assistance. We are not saying that that should be a back‑door route into social housing. What we are saying is that where you have got homeless families with children in need that some kind of response should be happening in that situation. Very often at the moment it is not. It is an issue about practice. I should say that some authorities do have protocols in place and practice is good; other authorities do not. What should never happen is that just because a family is homeless they should be faced with having children taken into care in that situation. What it means very often is that those families are forced into very desperate housing situations and circumstances. According to our Shelter Line service a woman slept rough in a park with her children for three or four nights because she got no help at all from social services. What we are looking for and what we would look for the government to be doing in that situation is to send a much stronger message out to social services that they have a role in that situation that they need to fulfil.

Q48 Mr Betts: Everyone probably agrees we need to spend more money dealing with the homeless situation but how should we spend it?

Mr Sampson: There are two mechanisms for spending it. Plainly we could spend money supporting individuals with the sort of support needs that were talked about earlier, supporting them to maintain their existing tenancies if they have them or re‑settling them back into social accommodation if that is available. That in the short term is a priority but in the long term, again taking the evidence that we heard previously, which accords absolutely with our understanding of the situation, homelessness is a manifestation or result of structural difficulties in the housing market and the long‑term under‑investment in the provision of affordable housing, particularly affordable social housing for rent. If there is one priority for government spending, while trying to maintain services for those who are in housing need at the moment, it is long‑term investment in social housing for rent.

Q49 Mr Betts: Basically it is long‑term investment in housing and then provision of support services for particular categories of homeless people with particular needs?

Mr Sampson: Absolutely, yes.

Chris Mole: You say that too much investment is going into key worker housing and not enough into traditional social housing for rent. What should be the balance of funding bearing in mind the danger that there might be more homeless people having houses but not having teachers for their children or police officers to deal with issues in their area?

Q50 Chairman: Or perhaps more important the social workers that you have just criticised for not getting stuck in.

Mr Sampson: I do not think what we have said is that we do not support spending money on key workers. What we questioned is given a limited pot of money the Government's priorities in how they have decided to spend that money. In the key worker debate it is very easy to talk about this merely in terms of doctors, nurses ‑ I was going to say politically popular people but then you introduced social workers into it and I speak as a former social worker myself - but equally important if we are going to have decent hospitals and schools is to have the hospital cleaners and the school caretakers and the dinner ladies and so on and so forth without which none of our public services can function. The key worker debate cannot get caught up in the sterile question of provision of houses for middle class people and forget the poor people; it is a continuum. Our criticisms are two‑fold. First of all, some of the way that some of the money has been spent on key workers, it seems to us, is misplaced. If you look at the cost‑effectiveness of some of the schemes, for example simply to give particular categories of key workers grants to compete on the housing market for purchase, and the long‑term impact of that is merely to fuel house price influence. It does nothing to increase the supply and availability of housing in the longer term. It increases house price inflation. In my work with the Home Ownership Task Force last year quite a lot of that discussion was considerable criticism of the current ways of subsidising key workers, which are not very cost‑effective. The second question is a question about whether we genuinely are right in prioritising housing aspiration over housing need. In the end if we have limited government subsidy it seems to us to be somewhat perverse to use that subsidy to improve the position of people who have housing but are aspiring to better types of housing over people who, by and large, have no access to housing at all.

Q51 Mr O'Brien: There is some evidence of housing associations not co‑operating with allocating accommodation to the homeless. What is your experience of that and what can we do about it?

Mr South: I think the words you use are "some evidence". It is a complex picture and certainly Shelter was very concerned in the late 1990s when you had a situation where homelessness and numbers in temporary accommodation were rising and at the same time the housing associations were making fewer of their premises available to homeless households. I think that situation has turned round to some extent and the figures bear that out, but it is very difficult when you have got very different local circumstances in different parts of the country to look at a national figure and take very much from that. What we are concerned about is not just a question of housing associations, it is very often nomination agreements that are made between local authorities and housing associations that are not adequate. Also housing associations often operate local lettings policies that can disadvantage homeless people when they do not take certain categories of people, so it is a complex picture. However, in a situation where you have got record numbers of people living in temporary accommodation we certainly think that housing associations and the Housing Corporation need to look at whether they are doing enough. I think it is a very interesting and important issue for this inquiry to explore with your other witnesses.

Q52 Mr O'Brien: Have you a view of any circumstances where housing associations would be right to refuse homeless people?

Mr South: The Homelessness Act puts down very clear criteria about when people should and should not be accepted into social housing and we think that that should act as the guide and the Housing Minister at the time of the reform was very clear about those circumstances. We do think that it is often the case that people are refused access to social housing in circumstances where they should be allowed access.

Q53 Mr O'Brien: Are you saying it should be left to the private sector then to take up the undesirables?

Mr South: That in itself is a very important question in the sense that if the social housing sector is not taking people with complex needs then where are they going? This Committee did an inquiry into the Housing Bill and many of those recommendations have been taken on as the Bill has been going through Parliament but one of the issues that came up there is that if you are leaving it to private sector landlords to take the strain on that, very often the problem is simply moved on and it can be magnified in that situation. We come back to the principle that very often for people with complex social needs social housing should be where they are housed.

Q54 Mr O'Brien: Do you think that choice‑based lettings schemes have helped or hindered homeless people's access to permanent housing?

Mr South: I think the jury is out on that. Obviously choice‑based lettings are being piloted at the moment. We have argued very strongly, and we are doing some work on this, that they should benefit homeless people and that homeless people should get choice over where they live. That is something that we need to watch and see what transpires through the pilot schemes and keep an eye on.

Q55 Mr O'Brien: How long have the pilot schemes been running?

Mr South: I do not know. I could not answer on that but I think they are getting towards the point at which their evaluations should start coming through in the not‑too‑distant future.

Q56 Chairman: Some homeless people are not particularly well organised and they are not particularly capable of working with bureaucracy. Choice‑based lettings discriminate against them, do they not?

Mr South: It does not have to. If homeless people are given the information and support et cetera to be able to make an informed choice that should be something that we aim for.

Q57 Chairman: And stock transfer companies are obviously now responsible to their existing tenants and to their business plan. Does that mean that they are less sympathetic to homeless groups?

Mr Sampson: I think there is some anecdotal evidence to indicate that, yes. Where we look at the range of pressures on housing associations, one does find that some of the requirements from government - for example to drive down the level of rent arrears and the anti‑social behaviour agenda - and pressure from their investors and their existing tenants all may conspire to pressurise them or to make them more risk averse in deciding who they take. Over a period of time that might quite naturally reduce the number of homeless individuals that they are willing to house. That pattern is not across the board. I think the important thing here is to say that the anecdotal at evidence we have found is that there is a range of very good housing associations but a number of them seem to be less willing to take people whom they may regard as more troublesome.

Q58 Mr Sanders: You express some concerns about the way councils house homeless households outside their districts. What are those problems?

Mr South: I think in London certainly the evidence is that around 15 per cent of placements now are out of borough. We did a survey of 400 homeless households and the evidence that that showed is that homeless children in that situation are missing 55 school days on average. They are very often placed a long way from their school so the choice is you have a very, very long journey to school or you have to find a new one. One in ten of parents in that survey had no school place for their child at all. So there are educational problems and dislocations there. There is also distance from family support networks. I think the thing about temporary accommodation (and you asked this of your previous witnesses) we would want to stress is the insecurity and instability that it causes, so as well as the numbers increasing the length of time that people are spending in temporary accommodation has virtually tripled since 1997. In London the average is 381 days. In some cases families are spending two or three years in that situation. You arrive in temporary accommodation, you are told it is a temporary situation and two or three years later you are still there. It is that instability and that insecurity coupled with placements a long way away from your home areas that are the real cause of the problems and damage that temporary accommodation causes.

Q59 Mr Sanders: Is it not inevitable that there will be out‑of‑area accommodation and authorities will have to use it sometimes?

Mr South: To some extent, and in London certainly, which is where you get most of it, obviously there are problems with the supply and location of temporary accommodation within those boroughs. Anecdotally, there is evidence that in other areas of the country out‑of‑area placements are becoming more common. That should not be the case necessarily. One of the key points we want to get across today is that local authorities should be more strategic not just in their overall housing strategy but their use of temporary accommodation. The homelessness strategy should help that by giving a clearer picture of levels of homelessness where that homelessness has taken place and then they ought to be able to procure through private leasing and that sort of thing temporary accommodation in those neighbourhoods so people do not have to go out of area.

Q60 Sir Paul Beresford: Part of your answer therefore could be to recognise that some of the temporary accommodation is better than much of the long‑term accommodation and perhaps there ought to be a move towards making the temporary accommodation contracts longer?

Mr Sampson: I think if we had a situation whereby a particular form of temporary accommodation for a particular family was decent quality, was close enough to area to meet their support, education or whatever needs, and where the financial regime attached to that temporary accommodation allowed for incentives to work rather than disincentives (which is the situation in so many of the cases now) and where families could know that they were in that particular form of accommodation for a predictable length of time then, yes, I think that is absolutely right and it would be very positive for the family. The difficulty is that for too many families none of that stuff currently is currently in place. Particularly the unpredictability of it where a family does not know whether it is settling in a particular form of temporary accommodation for a matter of weeks or a matter of years and therefore does not know whether it is worth persisting with keeping bussing their child to the other side of town for school or whether it is worth trying to get the child into the local school and buy the new school uniform and all of that stuff. That is the real problem at the moment.

Mr South: Private sector leased accommodation is very often better quality. Very often what comes with it is because the rents are so high and Housing Benefit is so high that there is no incentive for people to get into work. For example, a single mother with four children living in a house in an outer London borough getting £230 a week in Child Benefit and Income Support and her rent fully paid for by Housing Benefit at £280 a week, which is not an uncommon sum, what that would mean if she wants to get into work is she would have to earn £680 a week just to make that break even economically. So you have got huge, huge disincentives to work.

Q61 Chairman: Family Tax Credits do make a difference, do they not?

Mr South: Yes they do but the way that Housing Benefit tapers away means that those disincentives are still very large. Certainly one of the recommendations that we would put forward is if you switch the bulk of that subsidy away from Housing Benefit and into a direct grant regime (which would be cost neutral) then you would overcome some of those work disincentives and make it possible for people to get into work in that situation.

Q62 Sir Paul Beresford: Are you saying that we ought to be looking again at who we subsidise? Should we subsidise people or bricks and mortar?

Mr South: Yes.

Q63 Chairman: You are saying yes we should subsidise bricks and mortar?

Mr Sampson: Absolutely, switch the subsidy from the people to the accommodation.

Q64 Mr Sanders: I want to talk about hostels for a second. Do you think some local authorities deliberately do not provide hostels for single homeless people in their areas in order to persuade them to go elsewhere?

Mr Sampson: We have not got a huge amount of anecdotal evidence of that, although there may be some, but one can well believe in a situation whereby some local authorities have shown more of a desire to move homeless people on than necessarily engage with them and solve their problems, that there is also pressure to drive down hostel accommodation.

Q65 Chairman: You would not like to name one?

Mr Sampson: I would not under these circumstances. It is tempting but no.

Q66 Mr Betts: Go on!

Mr Sampson: Do not. I am trying to be good here! I think there is an issue with hostel accommodation at the moment. Certainly there is some good stuff that has been done with hostels recently. There has been an expansion in hostels and the quality seems to be improving and certainly the investment that government is about to make ‑ £90 million on hostel‑type services ‑ will be very, very welcome. However, I think we must be cautious about expanding our hostel system and producing a hostel system which merely seeks to accommodate a greater and greater number of people who are awaiting non‑existent long‑term housing. Already it is the situation that well over half, something like 70 per cent, of single homeless in hostels leave those hostels for negative rather than positive reasons. They are evicted or they give up or they go elsewhere and go back into the cycle of sleeping on friends' floors or disappearing into prison or wherever it is they go. That is because, frankly, they are waiting in those hostels for an increasingly long period of time for non‑existent social housing. To expand the hostel system is fine, to improve the hostel system is fine but in the end it comes back to where we started, the investment has to be in long‑term housing rather than expanded services for managing the number of homeless people around the place.

Q67 Mr Betts: We talked previously about social services and their role but clearly there are other agencies, particularly the Health Service and education which have a role to play. What is your view about the extent to which government in general is joined up on these issues? Very often we find in difficult homeless cases mental health problems, drug abuse problems, alcohol abuse problems, and they may cause the homelessness or the homelessness may cause those problems but there is an inter‑relationship there.

Mr Sampson: Sure. There are signs that government is beginning to embrace the fact that, as you say, these individuals have multiple needs. The cross‑governmental homelessness ministerial working party is one such thing. There is also recognition on the part of the Social Exclusion Unit that these are individuals that the Government must engage. All those things are welcome politically. What however does not seem to be happening on the ground is a great deal of co‑ordination in that bits of government policy seem to be working against other bits of it. In particular, some aspects of the anti‑social behaviour agenda that have a major emphasis on enforcement and a punitive approach do not seem to be adequately linked into the provision of services to help people solve their needs. So it remains the case in London that you may well be identified as being a street sleeper or beggar with drug treatment needs but getting access to good quality, immediate drug services remains extremely problematic. So the fledging signs of joined‑up government at the top still do not seem to be translated into joined‑up action on the ground.

Mr South: Particularly when you talk about education, one of the findings of the survey I mentioned earlier is that only one in five homeless families who are eligible for Sure Start is getting access to that service. They have an important flagship, which is a very good, very successful government initiative that is not actually reaching homeless people. I think they need to look at that. The DfES also needs to look at things like the grant that they make available for vulnerable children - travellers, asylum seeker families, those sorts of families - because those grants are not made available for homeless children, who are very often, as we have described, in very difficult circumstances. So I think more needs to be done across government to link different policies together and particularly to make the experience of living in temporary accommodation (which as we have described is now anything but a temporary experience a lot of the time), a less damaging one, particularly for children. We have talked about the statistics. Nearly two‑thirds of homeless acceptances are either families with children or families with pregnant women and kids are bearing the brunt of that. That is the central point that we would come back to. More needs to be done particularly to improve the experience for children in that situation.

Mr Sampson: If I may just very briefly add, it is not just central government either; it is also local government. In the survey we did of local authorities' implementation of homelessness strategies what that revealed is that only in a very, very small proportion of cases had social services actively been engaged in writing those strategies, despite the efforts in very many of the local authorities to get them to engage. They would occasionally turn up for meetings or they would send somebody at a relatively junior level who would never come back again. 80 per cent of those strategies were written largely, so far as we can judge, without adequate social services involvement. At local government level there is also a real issue that needs to be engaged with.

Q68 Mr Betts: Did you give that information to the local authorities and did you get a response from them?

Mr Sampson: We gave that information to local authorities and we also gave it to the ODPM who are carrying out a wider piece of research on those strategies. It may be useful to find out what their findings are but I would be very surprised if they were not similar to ours.

Q69 Mr Betts: Is that in the public domain?

Mr Sampson: We can certainly provide it.

Q70 Mr Betts: That would be quite useful for one or two of us to follow what our local authorities are doing. While we are on this area of special needs, I was at a housing conference in Birmingham last week and I suppose one of the elements of homelessness that often gets forgotten about is homelessness of older people. You mentioned at the start that there was a clear priority for families with children and women who are pregnant but it often gets overlooked that old people, particularly with mental illness problems, can have very real and particular needs that are often forgotten about in the system.

Mr Sampson: That is absolutely right and in fact we run a service in Sheffield deliberately targeted at providing floating support for older people, either older people who have a long history of homelessness and we are trying to support in maybe their first tenancy in a while or more particularly that growing number of older people whose tenancies or indeed their home ownership status is at risk because of their difficulty in managing physical or emotional or mental frailties. Given the demographics in this country that is going to become an increasing issue.

Q71 Mr Betts: Going on from there, you have talked about preventing people from becoming homeless by trying to help them. This is another big issue, is it not? You express some concern that sometimes prevention is a way of simply massaging the figures rather than doing anything real?

Mr Sampson: I think in some cases it may be. We have to be very careful about this. The Government's emphasis on intervention is one that we fully support and there are a lot of very good initiatives that are contained within individual local authorities' homelessness strategies that we want to see funded and implemented. However, in a situation wherein local authorities have a very limited stock and access to social housing and a growing level of demand on that housing, and at a time when the number of homeless acceptances and homeless people that are officially recognised by government is coming under increasing scrutiny, there may be incentives for some local authorities to drive down the number of acceptances, and prevention therefore may become a way of finding a disguised mechanism for refusing to accept some people who are homeless.

Q72 Mr Betts: Are there some particular examples of good practice that you could point to?

Mr South: Without rehearsing what our colleagues from York said, they evaluated our Homeless to Home projects (of which there are three around the country) providing tenancy sustainment support. The evidence from that is they have over the medium to longer term tenancy sustainment rates of 90 per cent and they are very successful at keeping people in their homes.

Q73 Chairman: Those three projects are where?

Mr South: Birmingham, which you are going to see I believe, Sheffield and Bristol. The other important aspect of those projects is that they can be very cost‑effective. Of course they cost money to set up and there are up‑front costs but in the long term there are very important spend-to-save arguments in the sense that making a homelessness application is expensive. The Audit Commission estimate that the cost of a failed tenancy is around £2,000 and then there is the cost of putting people in temporary accommodation. We reckon that that service can save as much as £2,000 to £3,000 per household on that basis. As I say, they are very successful in keeping people in their homes. The Government estimate that repeat homelessness is running at around ten per cent. In some local authorities they estimate that it is as high as 40 per cent getting on for 50 per cent so you can see that by using those services and by giving them priority they can make quite an impact on levels of repeat homelessness and also we must not forget that that addresses the human cost of homelessness as well.

Q74 Mr Betts: Finally, there is a fair degree of predictability as to when people are going to leave the Army or prison. Is enough done to deal with people's housing problems who can often become homeless in that situation or should we be looking for more from the authorities?

Mr South: I certainly think we should be looking for more from the authorities. The phenomenon of ex‑military personnel sleeping rough has been known for decades and very little effective has been done. There are some signs of engagement with the MoD on that and we have a project in Colchester trying to do just that, but that is not the same as a properly co‑ordinated and structured approach. The situation in the prison system is indeed far worse, simply because we know that whether or not somebody has a stable address to go to is the single greatest predictor of whether or not they are going to reoffend. Despite that, the Prison Service for years has failed to put in place adequate re‑settlement housing interventions. It is not just about interventions at the point when somebody is leaving prison and then trying to re‑settle them. What is so desperately required is engagement particularly with those many short‑term prisoners, who are only going to be in the system for a matter of weeks, at the point at which they enter the prison system. It is at that point that you may enable them to hang on to whatever tenancy they have and prevent rent arrears accruing while they are in prison. There does need to be a far greater emphasis within the Prison Service on proper re‑settlement services in a system which is overcrowded already and where access to prisoners is extremely difficult. I recognise that that is a tall order but nevertheless the Prison Service do need to engage more strongly with that.

Chairman: On that note, can I thank you very much for your evidence.