Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-74)
MR ADAM
SAMPSON AND
MR PATRICK
SOUTH
26 OCTOBER 2004
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 and welfare 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 is currently
in place. Particularly the unpredictability of it, where a family
does not know whether it is settling into 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 though, because the rents are so high and Housing Benefit
is so high is 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 that
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 to 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: Don't. 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%, 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 just expanding 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. 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 are getting access to that service. They have an
important flagship policy, 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 so 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
of 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% of those strategies were written largely, so far as we can judge,
without adequate social services involvement. At local government
level 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
the 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 prevention 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 were 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%
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 10%. In some local authorities they estimate that it
is as high as 40% getting on for 50% 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 Sampson: 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.
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