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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 61-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE
Tuesday 7 December 2004 MS JENNY EDWARDS, MR HOWARD SINCLAIR, MR JEREMY DREW and MR TARIG HILAL
MAJOR IAN HARRIS, MR NIGEL PARRINGTON, MR PAUL CAVADINO and MR NICK O'SHEA Evidence heard in Public Questions 217 - 316
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning Local Government, and the Regions Committee on Tuesday 7 December 2004 Members present Andrew Bennett, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts Mr David Clelland Mr John Cummings Chris Mole Mr Bill O'Brien Christine Russell Mr Adrian Sanders ________________ Witnesses: Ms Jenny Edwards, Chief Executive, and Mr Howard Sinclair, Board Member, Homeless Link; Mr Jeremy Drew, Foyer Federation; and Mr Tarig Hilal, Head of Policy, Crisis, examined. Q217 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the third session of the Committee's inquiry into homelessness and can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record. Ms Edwards: I am Jenny Edwards, the Chief Executive of Homeless Link. Mr Sinclair: I am Howard Sinclair. I work for the Broadway Homelessness Organisation, but I am here representing Homeless Link's Board. Mr Drew: My name is Jeremy Drew. I am General Manager of Portsmouth Foyer and I am here to represent the Foyer Federation. Mr Hilal: I am Tarig Hilal and I am Policy Manager of Crisis. Q218 Chairman: Does anyone want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Mr Hilal: I would like to say a few words. Crisis has been working with homeless people for 33 years now. For the last 27, ever since the introduction of the 1977 Housing and Homelessness Act, we have been working to plug the gap in that legislation and we have been working with single homeless people. There are two things that we would like really to communicate today. The first is that there is an issue in this country about our understanding of the full scale of homelessness. Put very simply, we do not have a full picture of it and one of the things we want to see is a census, a count of the number of single homeless people. The other is that single homelessness needs to be made a priority. I think that is the focus of our submission and is what we would like to communicate. Mr Drew: I would just like to say as a point of introduction really that I am here, as I said, on behalf of the Foyer Federation and that represents 130 foyers across the UK which provide accommodation integrated with education, training and support to 10,000 young people every year. Mr Sinclair: I am here on behalf Homeless Link. Homeless Link is an umbrella organisation for over 500 agencies across the country. It is very hard to quantify, but we reckon that those agencies support over 30,000 people each day in a variety of services and to meet a variety of needs. We work in partnership with everyone, statutory, voluntary, as that is the only way we know how to do our business and for us there are two main issues. One is the supply of affordable and accessible housing for people and the second is, for those 30,000-plus people, making sure that we identify and meet those needs clearly in a way that is most effective, so those are the issues. Chairman: Thank you very much. Since there are four of you at the table, if you agree with each other, you do not need to say anything, but if you disagree, please step in. Q219 Mr Cummings: Following the Homelessness Act of 2002, there were new categories added to the priority needs list. Would you tell the Committee how the new list has helped the homelessness situation throughout the United Kingdom and whether it has in fact created any new problems? Ms Edwards: I think the legislation was very definitely a step forward and we can see some of the impacts of that in helping people to come in from off the streets, people who before were perhaps turned away without help. However, I think it has created problems in its wake in that then people are held in temporary accommodation and there is essentially a bed blockage if there is nowhere for them to move on to. I think the other problem with the legislation is that although it did strengthen the duty of local authorities to help people who were not homeless in a statutory sense, that often is not followed up in any real and consistent way, and I think you will see from some of the written evidence that that is a general perception. There are about 75,000 people a year who are accepted as being homeless, but are not statutorily homeless because they are not seen as being in priority need or they are described as "intentionally homeless". Their paths after that are not tracked by local authorities and they are often people who turn up in need of help and support at our member organisations. Mr Drew: I think the change has of course introduced and made available to a wider range of people the option to be declared homeless and then given assistance and support, and I would welcome that. Particularly of course it has brought into the arena 16- and 17-year-olds who hitherto had quite considerable difficulty in accessing support, but I think there is still an issue around the areas of responsibility for local authorities. I think there is an issue around ensuring that the young people's needs are properly assessed and, particularly, looking at the issue of young people's needs being very severe, being quite acute really, and that needs to be recognised in the way that local authorities are dealing with it. One of the ways in which we think that could be addressed is establishing a unit that specifically looks at the single homelessness question, but also I think it raises the issue of how we can all work together to ensure that we look at prevention as well as dealing with the issue of homelessness as it is, and I think it is a very important area which we would like to see introduced as a performance indicator for local authorities. Q220 Mr Cummings: Interestingly, the evidence suggests that there have been large increases in acceptance since 2002, especially among the people you are referring to, young people, yet the single homeless agencies seem to be saying that the Act has had minimal impact. Could you indicate to the Committee the difference in view? Mr Drew: Well, I think there has been an increase in the number of 16- and 17-year-olds and I think that is clear. Evidence that your Committee has received already has indicated that that is so and I think also in the evidence which has been presented to your Committee it has been suggested that that has probably been because of a heightened awareness first of all and, secondly, because of course there is a statutory responsibility. Hitherto, young people may not have presented themselves as homeless because the opportunity for them to receive help has not been available whereas it is now, so that has probably made the difference to the number of 16- and 17-year-olds presenting themselves. Q221 Mr Cummings: Are you making it just too easy for them to leave home and to use the Homelessness Act to their advantage? Mr Drew: I do not think it makes it easy to leave home. There are a large number of reasons why young people leave home, very complex, and I think particularly foyers across the country are recognising that the issues that are being presented by young people who are moving in foyers, particularly the 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds, have very complex needs. We might say that actually the one main area of cause, if you like, for homelessness would be family breakdown and perhaps relationship breakdown within the family, and perhaps specifically step-parent relationships, but of course there are a lot of reasons as to why those relationships break down. I do not think it is made easy. I think one of the reasons it is not made easy is because the local authorities very clearly do assess whether there is intentionality, and they do that. There are patchy reports, I suppose, across the country as to how local authorities deal with those, and some local authorities possibly deal with those in a more friendly way than others, but I think it is addressed, the issue of whether it is merely a simple way of being housed, recognising, as I think colleagues here have said, on the issue of temporary accommodation, that I do not think they are necessarily offering young people something that they would want really to enjoy if they did not have to, that if they had a stable home, they would not have to. Q222 Mr Cummings: We understand that the definition of 'vulnerable' does vary from one local authority to another. Can you suggest any ways in which a uniform interpretation could be decided upon? Mr Hilal: I think one of the answers to that would be stricter guidance. I think one of the very simple reasons why the definition of vulnerability varies is because of the availability of social housing. It is a movable feast and it is a definition that can vary from one part of the country to the other, but one of the reasons why it varies is because local authorities often have limited resources and they are forced to vary it in order to house the people who, it is indisputable, have a right to housing, that is, people who have children. Ms Edwards: The situation is different in Wales and a lot clearer because the test of vulnerability is there for groups, for example, leaving the Armed Forces or leaving prison and I think that takes some of the doubt out of it. Mr Hilal: It is worth pointing out with regards to the increase in the numbers of people who are coming through from priority need that the increase has been among 16- and 17-year-olds where again the guidance is most clear. If you look at the numbers of people who are coming through in the other categories of priority, people leaving the Armed Forces, institutions and so on, the rise has not been significant at all. Q223 Chairman: As far as Wales is concerned with those clear definitions, does it mean they are recognising more people coming forward? Ms Edwards: It does and it was accepted that this would happen as a result of the secondary legislation changing, but that has been planned for and it does mean that more people, for example, leaving the Armed Forces are not ending up on the streets. I think we would accept that we do have a duty of care to them because they do not go through this additional process of proving that they are vulnerable as a result of having been in the Armed Forces. Q224 Mr Cummings: What additions would you make to the Government's priority needs categories? For instance, should long-term rough sleepers, who perhaps are termed as being institutionalised into that particular lifestyle, become a priority needs category? Ms Edwards: I think there are some additions that could be made to priority needs and you could end up with a very long list, but rough sleepers clearly are very vulnerable and often they have difficulty improving it and often they will not go and prevent it in the first case with the obstacles they feel will be put in their way. However, the alternative approach seems to be the one which is being taken in a phased way in Scotland which is to say that if somebody is homeless, you will not then put a number of hurdles in their way, one of which is to establish that you are in a priority needs category, but you are entitled to a degree of help. It is a challenging approach to it, but I think it is a much easier one than gradually adding in more and more groups. Q225 Mr Cummings: How satisfactory are the Government's definitions of 'intentionally homeless'? Ms Edwards: There really is not a definition of 'intentionally homeless' and that is a difficulty. It is why nine out of ten people going into some local authorities are turned away and not found to be suitable for help. Q226 Chairman: When you say nine out of ten for some local authorities, the lowest figure we had was about 20 per cent from Westminster, so which are the ones that are worse than Westminster? Ms Edwards: Well, the highest in the last quarter's list was in fact Doncaster with 91 per cent of people who present as homeless having their claims rejected, and there is a whole variety of reasons behind that. That is not saying that all of those are illegitimate reasons, but it is a sign that out of all those people, only one in ten then gets the result that they had gone there seeking. Q227 Mr Sanders: Has the increase in the number of categories simply seen extra pressure on authorities where there was already a high degree of pressure or has it dissipated and has the effect been even across the country? Mr Hilal: My sense would be that it has increased the pressure and it will have increased the pressure more in places like the south-east where there is a bigger homelessness problem and a bigger shortage of housing, but that is the need. If those are the people who are vulnerable, I think the question is whether we need to increase our resources, not whether we need to tighten categories again. Q228 Mr Betts: Just to pick up on this issue of intentionality, is it not a desperately difficult job for local authorities? I am just thinking of many local authorities who have a very clear policy where if someone is convicted of drug-dealing, they are evicted from their council house. It is very simple, and I think that would generally be supported by most people who live on estates and suffer from drug-dealing. However, if someone who has been convicted of drug-dealing comes out of prison, is the authority obliged to rehouse them or do they say, "Well, actually it's their fault because they used to be a council tenant, but they went into prison and they were evicted from their house for drug-dealing"? Is that not the sort of dilemma which is frustrating and would you welcome clearer guidance on that sort of thing? Ms Edwards: It is a dilemma. I think the question for all of us potentially, thinking about the priority for those groups, is that somebody is twice as likely to offend if, on having left prison, they do not have settled accommodation, and about half of the people leaving prison do not have that, so there is this dilemma: do we reduce the chances of offending and ensure that people do have accommodation or do we say, "Well, you're right at the end of the list"? Mr Drew: Importantly, I think it is whether there is an assumption that actually we will ensure that people are given the opportunity to reintegrate into society and if we are looking at reintegration into society rather than sidelining people because of a history, then we need to be looking at a holistic approach to ensure that that happens and one of the pieces of that jigsaw is housing. Q229 Mr Betts: That is okay as long as the old lady next door can be assured that the problem is not going to continue when the person is rehoused next to her. Mr Drew: Absolutely. Q230 Mr Betts: Just coming on to the issue of young people, is it not two sides of the same coin? We are arguing about whether the number of young people certainly in some instances has gone up because the priority categories have been changed or there is general pressure in the housing market and there is a shortage of housing, but is there not a sense in which perhaps young people now cannot get housing through the normal route? They cannot get on the waiting list, they cannot afford obviously to buy, it is more expensive in the private rented sector, and suddenly the priority gap is opened up as a possibility of getting a house if you are homeless, so is there a bit of collusion with the families who say, "The best way is for us to throw you out, then you can go down to housing and they will find you accommodation"? Mr Drew: What can I say? I have been a practitioner for 20 years and I personally do not believe that actually there has been a change in the approach of the young people. I think there have been changes in society, there have been changes in the pressures within families and changes in the way that families operate, and of course the issue around family breakdown and separation and step-parents, as I have mentioned already, is an issue. I do not think there is collusion and I think the issue of collusion has been addressed and is addressed by local authorities in the way that they are checking whether there is intentionality or not. I think that is evidenced. There may be one or two that actually slip through the net, but I think the issue is what is the offer and what is on offer is not a three-bedroomed house on a wonderful estate, but largely, and very often for young people, it is accommodation within the hostel environment and I do not think you should be looking at that as the most wonderful option of all. There are some very good hostels and very good foyers around the country that do some very good work in ensuring that young people can make that transition into independent living, but I do not think it should be seen as, "Well, that's the best option we're going to get". I do not think that is the route into long-term housing necessarily, as they see it. Mr Sinclair: Can I support that and say that the waiting lists that there are for hostels and other accommodation make it at times a tortuous route for people to go through. It is not an easy path to go. Q231 Mr Betts: Do you think it is different for young people than perhaps for older people or families who are seeking accommodation? Certainly the local authorities last week were saying that they thought that with the pressure in the housing market and people not being able to access housing from the waiting list where the local authority is key, there was a temptation for some people to present as homeless and to try to create a situation where they might be able to get a house more quickly. Mr Sinclair: I think the priority has been on families and I think local authorities have focused on families and getting families into appropriate temporary accommodation. I think if you had a league table, it would be the young people and the single homeless older people and none of those is an easy option. None of these is an easy route for people to go down and none of these is a route which ends up with a short-cut to permanent housing. Mr Hilal: I think it is important to put things into context in the sense that yes, theoretically people can abuse the system, and I am sure sometimes they do, but I think that the bigger issue is the numbers of people who are genuinely vulnerable, genuinely desperate and in need and are not getting the help and support they require. We did a study about six months ago, it was quoted at the last committee meeting actually, and what we found was that 50 per cent of people, and this was looking into a study at Craven, Sheffield and London, 50 per cent of vulnerable, single homeless people that we had interviewed, and levels of vulnerability were really high, people with drug and alcohol problems, mental ill-health, 50 per cent of those people were not approaching the local authority and were not getting any assistance. I accept that there could be abuse of the system, but I think our biggest fear should be those vulnerable people who are not getting the support they deserve and require. Q232 Mr Betts: What about the under-16s as a category? There is a problem there, is there not? Mr Drew: I think there is an issue and can I give you first of all some statistics which I think will help your first question, which are around young people and accessing accommodation because they just want out and they are creating, if you like, a lie, for want of a better word. For foyers, over 53 per cent have lived in unsatisfactory accommodation before they came here. They did not come straight from parents' homes and 26 per cent slept on floors, 14 per cent slept rough, 7 per cent were in local authority care and so on, so I think the statistics say, "Well, actually no, that is not the case". I think secondly there is an issue for under-16s and that is the issue around prevention. I think there is a very big important role that local authorities can play and the Foyer Federation has a very successful programme called Safe Moves which does work with the 13s-plus, and 13 is quite a critical point for young people, it works with the 13s-plus to prevent them from becoming homeless and also to do some family mediation and that, I think, links with the findings of the Social Exclusion Unit report, Young Runaways of 2002. That was operated as a pilot and now is being mainstreamed and that is a very important process to follow. Q233 Christine Russell: Much of the evidence that we have received has actually blamed the right to buy and the lack of investment in affordable housing through the 1980s and the 1990s as the principal reason for the rising tide in homelessness. Do you agree? Mr Hilal: From all the evidence we have seen, there are three reasons why people become homeless. The first is personal vulnerability, the second is around family breakdown, and the third is structural, such as poverty, unemployment, housing, and I think if we were to identify the main structural reason, then the lack of affordable housing is a critical one. Traditionally, affordable housing has come through local authorities and it has been social housing, which is why we often talk about it, but I think the bottom line is that there are poor, vulnerable people who cannot afford to find a home and that is why we focused on it. Mr Sinclair: I think the lack of affordable housing, and that is social housing, is not necessarily the reason why people become homeless, but actually people become homeless for the reasons that Tarig has said. I think it is a major barrier for people to get out of homelessness and that is the major issue, that actually once you become homeless, then to get back into permanent accommodation is so exceptionally difficult and to get back into permanent accommodation, in employment and contributing to society, it is almost impossible to make that leap without specific assistance. Q234 Christine Russell: Can I go on to ask you about the Government's current priorities which seem to focus perhaps on housing key workers and home ownership. Is that presenting you with a problem too? Mr Sinclair: We ran "Speak out for Homeless People" last week for the London Housing Board and the first question that the representative from the GLA got was from someone who was a rough sleeper who asked, "What's affordability? To us sleeping on the streets, what's affordability?" I think there is a major issue for homeless people across the country, particularly in London, about the focus on key workers and affordability just being totally beyond their reach, almost imagination in many, many cases. Mr Drew: From a single homeless point of view, I think the issue is that there needs to be investment in accommodation for single homeless people and accommodation that is available in the longer term, and that is really the issue. It is not necessarily an argument against key worker housing or anything else, but it is just saying that actually single people going into temporary accommodation, they need to find a route out of that. Q235 Christine Russell: Can I ask you about the type of accommodation because it is fairly typical for young students to live in houses of multiple occupation, yet again we have had evidence which seems to indicate that homeless people really do prefer single units. They prefer their own roof and they do not really want to share with other people. Is that your experience? Mr Drew: I think there is a very important issue here which is about recognising the complexity of the need of the homeless person in the first place and recognising that there are mental health issues, a history of drug/alcohol abuse perhaps, abuse and so on, a whole host of issues that are there and very often multiple needs, and to expect that person to be able to live in a shared environment, I think, may be a step too far. I think we have to have a good awareness of those issues. Mr Sinclair: I think that is right and I think you have to look at the population of homeless people and their needs. We talk about homeless people as if it is some sort of group that has commonality. Homeless people have two things in common, that they are isolated and they are scared. If you speak to homeless people, that is what they say. Beyond that, their needs are individual, but that isolation and fear is exacerbated by the crimes that are committed against them in a variety of ways and in a variety of settings. When people are in unsupported, shared accommodation, they are very vulnerable. They do not know who is moving next door to them, they have no right to say who is living next door to them and actually I think that leads to some of the difficulties and exacerbates the situation for some people. Q236 Christine Russell: Do you have any comments about the ghettoising, if you like, of homeless people that seems to go on where they are eventually found permanent accommodation and it tends to be on the least popular estates? You have done some work, have you not, Crisis? Mr Hilal: We are particularly concerned, well, everyone is concerned by this issue, everyone who works in the homeless sector, and it is a really kind of knotty problem. There are two projects which we are currently highlighting which we think could offer a solution to this, and I will mention the first as the most relevant. There is a project called 'The Urban Village' which we have copied from the United States of America, a project in New York, and what we are looking to do is to bring together low-income workers and homeless people into one space to create a community where they are offered support to help them get through any problems they may have related to mental health, drug addiction and so on, but also to help them to find work. One of the things which would really make a difference to a lot of homeless people is the opportunity to work. Q237 Christine Russell: So it is a kind of foyer with grown-ups in it? Mr Hilal: Yes, but I think the critical difference being that we are looking to create a permanent community, somewhere where people can at last settle. So much of the solution that we have to homelessness is about putting people in temporary accommodation. If you look at the £300 million spent by local authorities on homelessness every year, the majority of it is spent keeping people in temporary accommodation and we need to find permanent solutions that reintegrate people. Q238 Mr Clelland: Just on the point of temporary accommodation, one of the problems which is constantly coming through in the evidence to the Committee is this whole question of the 'silting up', of people moving into temporary accommodation, hostels, and not actually moving on. Is that a problem which the Government has created by widening the priority needs without looking at what happens next? Mr Hilal: I do not think it is necessarily an issue of widening the categories of need. I think the widening of the categories was simply a reflection of genuine vulnerability. The Government recognises that these are people who are really vulnerable and they need to be assisted. I think the issue is probably two-fold. The first is related to the lack of move-on accommodation and there simply is not enough affordable accommodation out there once people are ready to leave hostels. The other, and this is something that we do not talk about in the United Kingdom as they do in the States, is related to work. A lot of people who are in temporary accommodation are unable to work because they are trapped by the housing benefit system. Very simply, as soon as you start working, your housing benefit tapers down rapidly and it means that it is very hard for you to move out of accommodation. I think one of the solutions, and many homeless people, in fact everyone we work with, wants to work in something or other and one of the solutions would be to help people, to give people the opportunity to work as well as to give them the opportunity to access affordable housing. I think those are the issues. Ms Edwards: We have recently surveyed the major hostels in London or those providing services to homeless people and we are finding that 43 per cent of the people in those hostels are ready to move on and are just waiting there, and in fact that means that hostels are not able to take more people that they could work intensively with. The ironic thing is this is not all people waiting for high-level supported housing, but many people need low or even no support and could go into general needs housing, but only 7 per cent of local authority nominations go to non-statutory homeless people. There is nowhere for them to move on to. It has either got to be sorted out by supply, by nominations or there is a whole backlog at the moment and we are looking for a special offer from local authorities and other bodies to help solve that blockage because, otherwise, if the numbers start to creep up of homeless people if there is a housing crisis, then there is nowhere for people to go. Q239 Mr Clelland: On this question about the importance of people having the opportunity to work, in that case would it be better if the Committee were to recommend that rather than having so much accommodation in the form of hostels and temporary accommodation, that we have in fact more foyers for young, single people so that there is an opportunity to learn a trade as well as just being accommodated? Mr Drew: I suppose I should be dutybound to say of course! I think there are a number of issues though around that. First of all, I absolutely agree that we need more move-on accommodation and if there is anything that is going to improve the situation, it is about making sure that there is single-person accommodation being made available. If we do not, silt-up will continue and I think that is a very big issue. I think, secondly, there is an issue around recognising that not all temporary accommodation is necessarily poor. Foyers are recognised as adequate accommodation with an average stay of around nine months, but actually it is a very holistic approach, as you know, which is around meeting the needs of those young people, including training, education, health and so on. Tarig mentioned the issue about bringing those sorts of facilities into the community and I think that is a very positive approach. Foyers actually work in that way as well. There are different models of foyers and I think making sure that homeless people have access to services, and all the services that they need, will help them to make the transition and I think that is a very important part and is about joined-up working for all agencies. Q240 Mr Clelland: I have a foyer in my constituency and I know a bit about them. You talked earlier about the objective of foyers which is to reintegrate young people into society. Do you have any statistics to measure how successful the foyers are in that? Mr Drew: I will provide those statistics as I do not have them here. I can certainly tell you for my own, and I will provide the Committee with the statistics for the foyers nationally, but for my own foyer, our statistics are close to 70 per cent positive reintegration, which is very high. Q241 Mr Clelland: What does positive reintegration mean? Mr Drew: That means that they gain employment, they gain long-term accommodation, they address many of the issues that they brought with them, if you like, when they arrived, addressing things like health needs, education needs and so on, so I think that is a very positive thing. Q242 Chairman: Is it expensive compared to hostel accommodation? Mr Drew: I would not call it expensive. I have managed, if you like, traditional hostels as well. The issue is whether you provide the services. If you look at the types of services that foyers provide, health provision in partnership with the primary care trust very often, education-based skills, a big issue for the Government and something that the foyers are very keen on delivering, the delivery of qualifications, like IT, of course all of those cost. Now, they could do those in the community, but actually do not very often. What you are doing is making sure that they have access to them. Q243 Mr Cummings: One of the main aims of the local authority homelessness strategies introduced under the 2002 Homelessness Act was to prevent homelessness. Can you advise the Committee as to what progress has been made in relation to this? Ms Edwards: There are some examples of very good practice and Harrow is often cited as a local authority that has really got to grips with this, and there are some quite interesting, innovative projects around. There is an interesting one working with young people which St Basil's is operating in Birmingham, but they are the exception rather than the rule and I think everybody accepts that there is a lot more that can be done. Local authorities obviously have a very key role at the moment when people present there, but they are not the only part of government that actually could do an awful lot more to prevent homelessness. There are some key points of vulnerability when people leave care, the Armed Forces, or the asylum-seekers' service, or when they leave hospital. Often those moments have failed and we see elderly people perhaps being discharged from hospital without secure accommodation at the other end, we see people leaving the Armed Forces, and the MoD has done quite a lot on that, and particularly we are starting to see a rise in asylum-seekers who have been accepted as refugees, have been through the service and, in theory, have support, but are now arriving in our hostels, making up 20 per cent of the hostel population in central London. Now, that is a sign of preventative work that has not taken place. Q244 Mr Cummings: Do you know how successful the Ministry of Defence has been? Ms Edwards: I have not got the statistics, but I know that there has been a really determined effort recently and that is really starting to show dividends in pre-discharge cases. Q245 Mr Cummings: Does anybody have that information? If the Ministry of Defence is doing so very much, and you are the agencies at the sharp end of the problem, do you not know? Mr Hilal: Well, we do. Q246 Mr Cummings: You do? Mr Hilal: Anecdotally, our experience is that there has been a big impact and that they have helped a lot of people, especially on the prevention side. Now, we do not have a study, but a study has been commissioned, I think it is King's College that is doing it, and it will be out in the next few months. Q247 Mr Cummings: Who has commissioned the study? Mr Hilal: This is commissioned by the MoD, so we will be able to get some statistical data on the overall impact, but we can say, as people working on the front line for people who are coming through, and our experience tells us, that that problem is getting better. Q248 Mr Cummings: In relation to local authorities, do you find in the main that they are willing to co-operate with the agencies like yourselves? Ms Edwards: Yes. Mr Sinclair: Yes, I would say that it can work unless there is a problem of joint working across the board. That is not saying it is perfect everywhere or as we would like it to be everywhere, and a lot of local authorities would say the same, but it is essential. Housing strategies are very new and the recent ODPM review of housing strategies I thought was interesting, and if we did not have them, we would have to invent them and it is actually about how we make them work. The way we make them work is by actually seeing them as a conduit for the other local strategies, that they are not stand-alone, but they are actually a way of bringing about local action in local authority areas and that is the only way you are going to stop the average of 1,600 people coming on to the streets in London each year. Q249 Chairman: Can I just pursue the MoD question again. Are they getting good at helping people as they come out of the Armed Forces or are they getting good at those people who were institutionalised in the Armed Forces, came back, having a variety of relationships and jobs and things and then four or five years down the line end up being homeless? Mr Hilal: I think both. Q250 Mr Sanders: The 2002 Act aimed to improve strategic thinking regarding the provision of services to the homeless. Has it happened at a local council level, a regional level, a national level, at a practitioner level or not? Mr Hilal: Yes, is the answer, there has been more strategic thinking, but, an inevitable but, the problem is that the resources that are allocated to local authorities have not increased in a manner that is substantial enough to enable that strategic thinking to have the impact that would be desirable. As I understand it, local authorities received around £80 million for the implementation of the Housing Act back in 2002. Our sense at the time was that that was not going to be enough and I think local authorities probably would say the same. Mr Sinclair: I am not sure I would share the same view, but I think the Supporting People budget and the increase in that has assisted enormously in terms of putting services for homeless people on a much more secure footing than they were three years ago. Q251 Mr Sanders: That is not about strategy, is it? Mr Sinclair: But I think it is about implementing strategy. I think it is about how you make those local strategies work. My sense is that the whole Supporting People agenda has dwarfed the discussion about future strategy in terms of homeless people. Q252 Mr Sanders: So you think the resources direct the strategy, but the strategy does not direct the resources. Mr Sinclair: Yes, I think over the past two years the resource issues have predominated. Mr Drew: Certainly I think there is an issue. The strategies help, but I think the strategies very often need to go further and they are certainly an issue. I will keep coming back to this issue of prevention because I think it is a very important part of the whole and that might seem strange from an organisation that predominantly runs accommodation for young people, but we want actually to prevent young people becoming homeless in the first place, so that really is a very important part of the whole process, I think, and needs to be very significantly one of the performance indicators for local authorities. We need to replicate the type of service that we have mentioned before, such as Safe Moves which has a 40 per cent success rate in preventing the 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds from becoming homeless, and it is very important. Ms Edwards: I think there is a difference in the sort of joining up of strategies at national and local level. I think nationally very many of the key partners are now signed up to strategies, but that has not yet come through in implementation in joining up at a local level. The local homelessness strategies could be the route for that, but it has not got there yet and there are many partners who really need to be actively involved in solving the problems of individual homeless people. If the services are not centred on them and their individual needs, then you might solve one thing, but for people who might be in drug detox and they come out, if other things are not solved, you have wasted your time and resources and that person is actually moved back. Q253 Mr Sanders: Are there boundary problems here? Homelessness does not respect the boundaries of local authorities or the PCTs, so how are you tackling that? That surely should be part of any strategy to work across those boundaries. Ms Edwards: It is a very significant issue because homeless people or all people who suffer exclusion are more likely to move across boundaries and very often painstakingly a package of support has been built up, then they cross a boundary and suddenly there is no local connection, nobody wants to know them and they are at the start of a queue again. Then the hostel or the day centre that they presented to is trying to put together this complex package and then they move on again. It is a real problem and it is one of the reasons why we would like the Government to look at the idea of perhaps a smart-card or a system where, when somebody has been properly assessed because of their health needs, their mental health needs or their training needs, that does not then disappear as soon as they move on, but they carry that assessed entitlement with them. Q254 Mr Sanders: So a compulsory ID card? Ms Edwards: Well, there are a number of issues around this, but in terms of actually ensuring people get the support they need so that they can move on, and if they get it, they can move in ---- Q255 Chairman: But an awful lot of these groups who are vulnerable manage to lose all sorts of documents, do they not? Part of their problem is the failure to look after documents. Ms Edwards: There is quite a good tracking system in London though called 'Chain' which could potentially be extended more widely around the country which does allow a significant proportion of homeless people to be tracked and their histories and risk assessments to happen much quicker than would otherwise be the case. Q256 Christine Russell: Can I ask you very quickly about rough sleepers. The Government tells us that the strategy has worked and there are now two-thirds less sleeping out on the streets. Is it true and can it be sustained? Mr Sinclair: Yes, it is true and, as I said, it is a success story of all the agencies involved. Can it be sustained? Yes, I believe it can be sustained, but it will not necessarily follow unless we tackle some of the other issues we have spoken about today, notably prevention and preventing people from getting on the streets in the first place. Mr Hilal: I think the only other thing I would like to add to that to support all of that is that rough sleeping remains a significant problem in our country and we should remember that. We are still talking about probably around 5,000 people who are sleeping rough over a period of a year in England alone and if you count Scotland and Wales, that goes up, which is not dissimilar to the kind of figures we saw in the 1960s when organisations like Crisis were set up. Q257 Christine Russell: Would you like to hazard a guess as for how many of those 5,000 it is their genuine, sincere wish to remain on the streets? Mr Hilal: I have real difficulty accepting that anyone with any real choice would ever choose to be on the streets. Mr Sinclair: In London 194 people have a five-year history of sleeping rough and there are 61 rough sleepers on the Chain database who have been referred more than ten times, to give you a sense of that entrenched body of people. Q258 Mr Betts: Is the Government trying to ignore the problem of the hidden homeless and should we actually be trying to do a count of that and can we actually find a suitable definition by which to count it? Mr Hilal: I think the answer on the definitions is absolutely yes, we can. In this country we have a legal definition of homelessness which kind of distinguishes us in many cases, so there is no problem around definition. I do not think the Government is trying to hide from this issue. It is a very problematic issue, but we need to start to look at the problem of homelessness not from the perspective of the number of services that we provide, and that is how we count homelessness now, but how much service do we provide and that is how many homeless people there are. Everything we know anecdotally, in terms of research, every expert in the country from the Audit Commission through to Shelter would say that there are people out there who are vulnerable and homeless and do not turn up to their local authority for help, and the numbers are likely to be significant. The only issue of contention really is whether we should do something about it or not and I think even there, there is an increasing consensus around it. Q259 Mr Sanders: But who should do that something and if it is the local authority, they will be guided by what resource they have and will be reluctant to get involved if they do not have the resource to deal with the problem which is presenting itself, let alone going out and finding more work to do. Mr Hilal: Well, I think the long-term goal must be to increase the resource. I do not want to sound too idealistic or naïve in any way, but if we live in a country where we believe that homelessness is unacceptable, if we have a legal definition of homelessness and we have a clear definition of when someone deserves help, and those people are still not getting help, then we cannot say we have not got enough resource, but we have to say, "Where do we get the resource from?" Now, we would like to see a long-term move, and we are not saying this would happen next year or the year after, but a long-term move towards the kind of model that they have in Scotland. We live in ambitious times and we live in times when we want to end child poverty and there is no reason why we cannot in the time that we want to end homelessness. Q260 Mr Betts: Is not a lot of homelessness really just what is called "sofa-surfing" where they move around, they share a place for a bit and then they eventually settle down somewhere? Is there really a need to get terribly worked up about that? Mr Hilal: To answer your question, really we need to go to the core of what we mean by a home and for us a home is somewhere that is permanent, secure, decent and which a person has a right to be in, an entitlement to, and that is the legal framework in which we operate. Now, the people that we are talking about are not people who have any of those things and they are certainly not people who are just moving between homes, between university and when they get their job down in London, but these are genuinely more vulnerable people. I say this again, but no one who works with homeless people would be able to tell you that this is not true. I think the real issue is just about precisely how many there are, but we know it is a significant number and we know they are vulnerable. Again I can refer you to the research we did in Sheffield, Craven and London. These are people who are sofa-surfers and the levels of vulnerability were not dissimilar to the kind of people we see staying in hostels and temporary accommodation. Mr Drew: I would echo that. I think the issue is that young people who are accessing foyers throughout the UK, wherever they may have previously lived, come with a range of complex needs and I think it is a simplistic view to say, "Well, that's just what young people do". I do not think that is the case in the people we are dealing with who are actually homeless. There is an issue around if we have got to count, we need to be clear about what we are counting and why and, secondly, if we are going to do that, we need to make sure that there is an action plan to deal with the issues that are identified when we do the count, and that is very clear, I think. Q261 Mr Clelland: Some evidence suggests that black and minority ethnic groups are over-represented among the homeless, but is that your experience? Do they have specific needs and could you give us some examples of the work you are doing to address those? Mr Sinclair: Yes, it is our experience and yes, there is an increasing number of rough sleepers, and the population of people in London hostels has gone up from 13 per cent to 35 per cent over the past ten years. The work we are doing, my organisation has completed a language audit and it shows that we work with people who have 44 different first languages in London alone, and that is just a fairly medium-sized London agency. It actually works as more or less about getting to know the individual. It is about individuals and individual needs and working from there and once we start making assumptions about homeless people and we start making assumptions about people black and minority ethnic backgrounds, it leads us into all sorts of difficulties. We have to work from the individual. Mr Drew: I agree with that, that it should always be about an individual needs-led assessment and about meeting the needs of the individual. I think from a foyer perspective there is some very good work that foyers do nationally in accessing universities, and an interesting statistic only is that we have a particular university support project that runs where 59 per cent of the students are from minority ethnic groups who are accessing university through foyers, so I think it is quite an interesting statistic. Q262 Mr Clelland: How much of this problem is related to immigration and asylum difficulties? Mr Sinclair: It is and we have done some research that shows that 20 per cent of people living in hostels in London are either asylum-seekers or refugees, so I think it is a very real issue. There is also an increasing question about people coming from EU Accession States and being seen to access our services as well, so yes, I think there is a link. Chairman: Well, on that note, can I thank you very much for your evidence. Memorandum submitted by NACRO Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Major Ian Harris, Director of Social Work, and Mr Nigel Parrington, Chief Executive, Salvation Army Housing Association, Salvation Army; Mr Paul Cavadino, Chief Executive, NACRO (National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders); and Mr Nick O'Shea, Director of Development, Revolving Doors Agency, examined. Q263 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the second session this morning and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please. Major Harris: I am Major Ian Harris, and I am the Territorial Director for Social Work for the Salvation Army. Mr Parrington: I am Nigel Parrington and I am the Chief Executive of the Salvation Army Housing Association. Mr Cavadino: Paul Cavadino, Chief Executive of NACRO, the crime reduction charity. Mr O'Shea: I am Nick O'Shea, Director of Development for the Revolving Doors Agency. Q264 Chairman: Well, before we go to questions, do any of you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Major Harris: Perhaps I could just mention that we are very grateful for the opportunity of contributing to this Committee. The Salvation Army is large and it offers very diverse services in the United Kingdom and in southern Ireland. In the field of homelessness, we have 50 residential centres offering 3,000 beds each night. My colleague, Mr Parrington, who is the Chief Executive of the Salvation Army Housing Association, which is the registered social landlord and our preferred tenant, together we provide services for in excess of 7,000 people a year. Q265 Chairman: Thank you very much. Anyone else? Mr Cavadino: Perhaps I could briefly mention the position, in particular, of people in prison. About a third of the people who go into prison had no home before they went in. Another third have had accommodation, but lose it as a result of serving a prison sentence. That means that the issue of homelessness when prisoners are released is a significant one in its size. It is also related to public safety because the evidence shows, even on the most conservative estimates, that somebody who is released with settled accommodation has a likelihood of reoffending which is cut by a fifth, and there are some studies which put the impact as much greater than that. For example, one study indicated that those released from prison with settled accommodation had a likelihood of reoffending less than half that of similar offenders who were released homeless. It is an issue of homelessness but it is also an important issue in relation to crime reduction. Q266 Mr Cummings: All of you work with people who have alcohol and mental health problems. Do you believe their specialist needs can ever be met under the mainstream, or should separate specialist services be established? Should responsibility for coordinating these programmes be handed over to the voluntary sector? Major Harris: We are dealing with very complex and multiple needs here. To identify individual substance misuse, whether that be alcohol or drug and mental health issues, is very difficult, it is a partnership approach and I do not think it is something that should be handed over to the voluntary sector. It is something that we have to work together on and when we do work together well we work together for the benefit of the people that seek our services. Q267 Mr Cummings: How do you believe that could be achieved? Major Harris: My experience locally is that this is really when our people get working together with other social providers in partnership, it is when we work closely with local authorities and it is when we work with primary medical facilities and psychiatric facilities. Mr O'Shea: I would agree. 65 per cent of our clients who have mental health problems or multiple needs require being linked in with six or more services and the key piece of learning from our work has not been about providing a new service that will just work with these people in isolation, it is actually about linking them to some very good services, which it is doing at the moment, it is about getting them to engage with them. Mr Cavadino: There are some excellent individual services. For example, we run a number of accommodation services in partnerships with specialist drugs rehabilitation agencies where we provide housing and housing support and the Drugs Rehabilitation Agency will provide the specialist rehabilitation programme for our tenants. What needs to happen is co‑ordination by the statutory agencies. What I would like to see is a greater involvement and partnership with the voluntary sector rather than handing the whole thing over. Major Harris: Perhaps I could give you an example of something that is working in our experience, which is the Cardiff Bus project. It is an initiative of the Welsh Assembly, it is headed up by the Salvation Army, but it is using all the main contributors to services. It is a bus that operates during the day and through the evening as well and it provides really diverse services. It includes medical referrals, it includes psychiatric services, it includes point of contact services as well as referrals on and it appears to be working very well. Mr Parrington: Do you want another example? Q268 Mr Cummings: Yes please. Mr Parrington: In terms of the Salvation Army, which obviously is the largest voluntary organisation in this country, we undertook a pilot in St Helens where we had potential areas of low demand and we had a series of failed tenancies and people not sustaining their tenancy. As a result of combining support and people funding we were able to supply housing support workers to provide additional support to residents moving from homes into general needs accommodation, but with the voluntary support of the Salvation Army they were able to provide community support at weekends and emotional support to people that would not have occurred unless we had that particular link. I think it is important to emphasise that it is a combination of partnerships between the statutory and voluntary sectors. Q269 Mr Cummings: Mr O'Shea, I understand you have a Link Worker scheme to facilitate multi‑agency working, and a Multi Agency Review Framework to help local agencies improve their inter‑agency co‑ordination. Are you aware of any similar initiatives run by local authorities? Mr O'Shea: I would say there is huge variation between local authorities. Islington is a good example where they have many multi‑agency panels which come through right from the very serious offenders through to the more low level offenders and as we have worked in Islington the panels that we have set up have become less needed because there are others taking over, but it is very variable. There are other authorities where we work where there is not that kind of work at all and there is no desire for that to happen. Q270 Mr Cummings: Why do you think that is? Mr O'Shea: I do not have a statistical answer as to why that is, but I think it is about priorities. Different places have different priorities for what they want to do. Offenders with mental health problems and who take drugs are not people's priority in every case. If you have got a big problem with families or victims of domestic violence, they are going to be your priorities and it comes down to joint interpretation, but I do not have statistics to back that up. Q271 Mr Cummings: So you do not think it is a matter of cash but a matter of perception? Mr O'Shea: It is always a matter of cash. It is about what you are going to use to prioritise that money for so that everybody has roughly the same amount. In Islington, for example, when you come out of prison you go straight into a reception centre if you are homeless and then you go on from there. In Ealing we have had significant difficulties trying to house people because the resources are being employed elsewhere. Q272 Christine Russell: Mr Cavadino, you gave us interesting statistics at the beginning about ex‑offenders and the fact that one-third have no homes when they go into prison and one-third lose their homes during the course of their stay in prison. What are the differences between short stay and long stay prisoners in terms of challenges and what should the Home Office be doing about the problem? Mr Cavadino: Two‑thirds of the people who are sentenced to prison each year are sentenced for under 12 months. Most of the people who go in and out of prison are short‑term prisoners, but a short prison sentence can still mean that you lose your accommodation. Q273 Christine Russell: I thought Housing Benefit was paid for some of the period. Mr Cavadino: If you are going to be in custody for 13 weeks or less on a sentence then you can have Housing Benefit paid to cover that period. That assumes, of course, that you are clued up enough to claim. That is why it is particularly important that one of the recommendations in our written memorandum, namely that all prisons should have a housing advice service available to all prisoners who need it, should be implemented as soon as possible. It is part of the Government's longer‑term aims in their Reducing Reoffending National Action Plan, but it needs to happen as rapidly as possible. If you have a housing advice service it means that as soon as somebody goes into prison you can interview them, assess their housing need and, where it is possible, keep their accommodation open for them during a short sentence, contact the local authority, make the Housing Benefit arrangements, surrender the tenancy promptly so that the prisoner does not build up arrears through not doing that which will rule him or her out of being rehoused and those arrangements can be facilitated greatly if there is somebody who can advise the prisoner and make those arrangements as rapidly as possible. Q274 Christine Russell: That is probably easier to achieve where you have a local authority or a housing association as a landlord. Would there not be particular problems if the prisoner was in private rented accommodation? Mr Cavadino: Yes, there are particular problems. One of the problems is the fact that if somebody does not have to surrender a tenancy because the landlord is not prepared to rehouse that prisoner even under the arrangements that I have just set out then the prisoner, if he/she is going to go back into the private rented sector, will then face a series of obvious problems related to the fact that they have no money on release. If rent in advance is required then it may be possible to achieve that through the Social Fund, if a loan can be achieved for that purpose, but you cannot normally get that kind of assistance for a deposit and many landlords require a deposit. There are a number of rent guarantee schemes or bond schemes effectively for deposits which operate well and one of the key things that would help released prisoners to be housed more readily in the private sector would be an extension of those schemes. Mr O'Shea: I want to come back quickly to the 13 week rule. I was one of the co‑writers of the national rehabilitation strategy that Paul alluded to at the Home Office and one of the big problems we have is that when you go into prison for more than 13 weeks you lose your Housing Benefit instantly, but it does not cover the notice period of four to six weeks that you would have on any tenancy and so you automatically end up with rental arrears which then bar you from housing. That was one of the things that we really tried very hard to change when we were negotiating that strategy and we were unable to do so. Mr Cavadino: That is now changing and it will be possible in the future for Housing Benefit to cover the notice period. Q275 Christine Russell: I want to move on to pick up something that you put in your report, Mr O'Shea, where you pointed out the fact that in the last two years local authorities have only rehoused about 250 ex‑prisoners. Mr O'Shea: It is under the amendment to the Homelessness Act, yes. Q276 Christine Russell: Surely you accept that it is very difficult for a local housing authority or indeed a housing association to justify rehousing ex‑prisoners ahead of people who have perhaps been on a waiting list for months or even years in many cases? Mr O'Shea: Yes, I agree. In one borough there are people who have been on the waiting lists since 1969. I think that is then about whether you make something a priority and you stick with it or you do not. This amendment has been made and the hope was that it would make people a priority and it has not because intentionality and vulnerability are still being read very differently. Q277 Christine Russell: Should there be a quota system for each housing provider? Mr O'Shea: That is one way of prioritising. If you are going to make somebody a priority then the resources have to be there to make it happen. Invariably the local authorities are sitting there saying, "I don't agree with that and I'm not going to do it." It is very much about saying I have got ten houses and I have got 50 people, what are we going to do? Mr Cavadino: It is our very strong impression that the readiness to classify a release prisoner as vulnerable and the readiness to classify them as being "intentionally" homeless because they committed an offence vary according to the amount of housing stock that local authorities have available. The threshold for that goes up and down almost in proportion to the amount of available housing stock and that is understandable. In Wales where the definition is much tighter, ie if you are released from an institution you are one of the priority categories without having to pass an additional threshold of vulnerability, the position is much clearer cut. I would ideally like to see that extended nationally. If that does not happen then we need a tighter definition of vulnerability because it varies so much and that would, among other things, involve looking clearly at the sorts of categories that would increase your likelihood of being classified as vulnerable anyway, such as mental illness, but it would also mean looking at the need for help with addictions. People who are released without support from family and friends could reasonably be regarded as more vulnerable than those who have that kind of support. Some tighter definition in the guidance at least would help. Q278 Christine Russell: You would obviously support elements of the support actually starting long before release to help the person perhaps have a greater chance of retaining dependency? Major Harris: We recognise the tensions of local authorities in having to prioritise the priorities because of scarce resources and that goes right the way through the whole sector. Q279 Chris Mole: How could it ever be that people with mental health problems or learning disabilities are not regarded as vulnerable when making homelessness applications, or is it the same sort of situation as you were just describing, ie the thresholds go up and down with the availability of housing? Major Harris: Yes, I think that is exactly it. People with mental health issues affecting their lives are seen in different ways. Some of those are identified medically or in different ways, but what it does is it affects their ability to live independently, successfully, to sustain tenancies and to sustain independent living. It is the services that need to back people whatever their needs, particularly those with mental health issues and multiple issues, that needs to be in place to be able to help that long‑term independence be achieved. Mr O'Shea: You must be able to demonstrate that you have a severe enough mental health problem in order to be considered vulnerable which means getting an up‑to‑date current diagnosis. Someone made the point about people who are vulnerable losing their identification and losing everything. If that was the least of their problems then that would be fine. It is very difficult to get, for example, a diagnosis from a prison or even evidence of what medication you have been on and yet the burden of proof is on you. If you cannot go to the housing office with all that information and so on they will not house you. Q280 Chris Mole: So mental health services are often regarded as "Cinderella" services. How might they develop to support homeless people better? Major Harris: In Cardiff some years ago a community psychiatric nurse was allocated to the homeless of the city and she was not only working with psychiatric issues but also accessing a whole range of medical and housing issues and this person almost became the co‑ordinator as the first point of contact with people who were exhibiting mental health issues. Q281 Chris Mole: So that was a mental health trust that was being forward looking and experimental? Major Harris: Yes. Mr Parrington: In some of the 50 residential centres which cover the 3,000 lettings we have medical centres where we are bringing in the health professionals as opposed to expecting homeless people to try and access those particular services elsewhere and that is working quite successfully, for example, in Birmingham and in Bristol as well. Major Harris: And Bradford. Q282 Chris Mole: There is a lot of development needed around legislation to tackle anti‑social behaviour. Is there a concern that people with mental health problems or learning disabilities might have their behaviour interpreted as anti‑social and that leading to them having problems with housing? Mr O'Shea: Completely. Anti‑Social Behaviour Orders are one of the biggest things that are hitting our client group in particular. I can see they have their place and they have been shown to be very effective. We have a person who is coming out of Woodhill Prison who was unable to go into the city centre of High Wickham under his ASBO and that is where the housing office is. What do you do? Do you smuggle him in or what? A second example is of someone who was leaving Holloway Prison and she was on an ASBO which banned her from being in that area and so as soon as she left the prison she was carted back for breaking her ASBO. It is a problem in terms of people being able to access those services they need. They are marginal examples but they are still examples. Mr Parrington: There are examples from other housing associations I am aware of, for example in Haringey, where there is a strong support package to enable that person to have a successful tenancy which did not exist prior to supporting people. There are limited examples around the country where that support package can enable the situation to work for both parties, the existing residents and incoming residents. Q283 Mr Betts: Do you think local authorities are only using the intentionality rules to sort out a rationing system, they are desperate for accommodation, they have got too many people coming in for it and they find this is stopping some people from being entitled to the homeless legislation? Mr Cavadino: Certainly in relation to offending that is the case. There are some authorities that will say that somebody is "intentionally" homeless because they committed an offence. Because they intentionally committed the offence they are assumed to have intended the consequences which may involve going to prison and thereby losing accommodation. That seems a tenuous definition. Intentionality is several stages removed from the original intention to commit an offence. More importantly, it means that if we are going to prevent reoffending, which is much more difficult if somebody is homeless, it is self‑defeating. I would like to see the legislation clarified to try to dissuade local authorities from regarding someone as "intentionally" homeless simply because they have committed an offence in order that they would look at all the circumstances of the case and decide whether the person is vulnerable and ought to be housed under the priority category. Major Harris: We are very concerned about the term "intentionally" homeless when placed upon people who are living very chaotic lives and who have these multiple issues. We are using a measurement that really does not apply successfully to those people and we need to widen that as far as possible. Q284 Mr Betts: Let us take it the other way round because the local authorities have a problem as well as some of these individuals having problems. As MPs we all get cases of elderly people in flats coming to us and saying, "Our lives are being ruined. We have had a young person move in, their mates are staying with them, we are getting noise all night, the banging of doors, there is clearly drug taking going on, drinking and beer cans being thrown around, windows have been put through, you name it, urinating on the stairs. We have had enough." Ultimately the pressure comes on and that person is probably evicted. What does the local authority do when they present themselves as homeless, do they say there is no intentionality in that? Mr O'Shea: The test of the law is always on the margins. That is quite a different story from somebody who is just coming out of prison and trying to make a fresh start, that is about somebody who is committing quite serious anti‑social behaviour. Our clients would probably commit some of that behaviour and they can be nightmares to live with which is why the schemes are set up, but with a little support our Link Worker is able to go in there and try and resolve the issues that are going on. You cannot always do that and there will be prices to pay for that, but the alternative is that if you do not do anything at all, you just leave it and then you evict them, where do those people go? They are going to end up somewhere. This is the Revolving Doors syndrome. It starts with a tenancy break down, it then leads to the problems worsening, you are then into homelessness and then you are into prison and before you know it you are in and out, in and out, in and out. I would not want to live next door to somebody who was doing that either, but there is a lot more you can do than evicting people and saying that is enough. Mr Parrington: I believe the key to all of this is in supporting people and we hear a lot about cuts in supporting people and the Gershon Review and the efficiency savings that that pressure has placed upon people. Unless there is a support mechanism put in place you will see a lot more of these failures. Whilst I do not want to divert this Committee to talk about supporting people, it is a key part of our process. Unless that funding mechanism is available then we will see instances as has just been described. Q285 Mr Betts: Is really what you are saying that these young people are being put in accommodation and they have not been supported and that actually being transferred to a similar accommodation is not going to work? Mr Parrington: There is evidence that sometimes people are placed without support. One of the key things from the RSL sector (and there was research undertaken by the Housing Corporation in 2003) is that one of the barriers to successful nomination is ineffective support packages and that was a piece of independent research and unfortunately it gives RSLs a degree of bad press in the sense that they are seen to be rejecting people, but the key factor is that those individuals do not have the correct support package and so they are almost set up to fail. Mr Cavadino: We have used the supporting people funding framework to increase the number of 'floating' support projects that we run providing support for people in accommodation provided by local authorities or by other housing associations and there are some very effective schemes. The ODPM announced last week the allocations to local authorities under supporting people which on average are being cut by five per cent. We are obviously concerned that that should not lead to a disproportionate reduction in housing or fleeting support opportunities for the particularly vulnerable and that includes the most difficult and disruptive people who need it most, in fact the ODPM has expressed the concern that that should not happen. What is important is that it should be monitored closely to ensure that it does not happen. Q286 Christine Russell: How much do you believe that the current problems with homelessness are attributable to a lack of affordable housing? Mr Parrington: I would say that the contributions currently being made by RSLs in terms of housing are in the region of 40 per cent of all of our lettings and the access point to that in 80 per cent of the cases is via the local authority. There has been an effort over the years for RSLs to make a contribution to homelessness. I think it is well documented with such papers as the Barker Review and other papers produced by the National Housing Federation and the Institute of Housing that there is this supply and demand issue. I think it does vary in different parts of the country. For example, in our experience in St Helens homelessness is there for different reasons, it is because there are areas of potential low demand. Q287 Christine Russell: Do you want to elaborate a little bit on your experiences, because you are spread across the whole country, as to how the problem is different in different parts of the country? Major Harris: The problems are different. For instance, in the cities and in the south particularly we have a lack of affordable housing which means that, as was said in the previous session, the residential centres are clogged up and there is not the flow through. In certain parts of the north‑east which I am aware of and in Hull and Darlington we have a situation where there is a lot of affordable housing but it is not necessarily in areas that are acceptable and this actually causes a problem when people are hurried through the hostel system and encouraged to leave it before their issues have been addressed. There are different types of tensions but at the end of the day it is about a balance of allowing people to come through. In a point of crisis it is very often about allowing them to work through those issues and move to independence supported at the right level. It is not a simple and straightforward answer. Q288 Christine Russell: Those people who are hurried through, do they then become the nightmares to live with, as Mr O'Shea just called them a few moments ago? How do we then manage to build sustainable communities and not ghettoise people? Major Harris: The extreme there is that they become the nightmares. The other extreme is that they just are not able to sustain a tenancy long enough to become a nightmare. We also have a situation in Hyde in Manchester where we have a non‑residential project and the funding is provided by the Salvation Army and a number of other agencies, where we have provided volunteer support to communities and the volunteers live in the communities as well as people who are paid to be project leaders and we find ourselves working almost in a mediation role because it is about working together as a community and it is about bringing the community together to address issues so that you can avoid them becoming extreme difficulties. Mr Parrington: I think one of the important things the Committee needs to be aware of is that the Approved Development Programme from the Housing Corporation, which has been approximately £1 billion a year over the last two to three years for supported housing projects, was running at about nine or ten per cent and it is now down to three per cent. You have a situation where the throughput of schemes is not happening because the corporation are not able to provide the capital funding because there is no guarantee of supported people funding being available. Q289 Chairman: What is the problem, is it that the Housing Corporation is not putting the money up or that the supporting people will not take up their responsibilities? Mr Parrington: Supporting people is capped and, therefore, the corporation are not allowed. There is a Directive from the ODPM to put through more schemes than would potentially have an impact on the supporting people budget in the future. Until the issue is resolved in terms of supporting people and there is certainty ‑ and there are lots of reviews going on at the moment about that particular form of funding ‑ those schemes will not be produced and those schemes take two or three years to develop, so you are into a situation where there will be a demand from those within the sector for these types of schemes and they will not be produced. Mr Cavadino: The issue of affordable housing has to be a part of the solution in those areas where the housing shortage is worst and that clearly includes London and the South‑East, but it also includes a number of other areas around the country. The average length of stay of tenants in our accommodation in London is over twice as long as it is in other parts of the country and that is simply because of the difficulty of finding move on accommodation. It also impacts on local authorities and other housing providers' willingness to take people with a history of rent arrears, which is often one of the biggest obstacles to rehousing vulnerable people. They have often got a history of rent arrears. In London if somebody owes between £1,000 and £1,500 in rent arrears and for 12 months they have been repaying it on an agreed negotiated repayment plan we still cannot get them into housing and it is simply because of the shortage of accommodation, even though by that stage they have demonstrated their readiness to repay the arrears as well as pay the new rent. Q290 Mr O'Brien: I want to press you a little bit further on hostels. Do you believe in them? Major Harris: They have their place to play. To take somebody from the street with a chaotic lifestyle, with multiple issues and place them straight into supported independence or independence without support is not the best way of doing this. What we need is a flow through where people can have the right support for the right period of time, leading on to the right support and independence. The hostels have a part to play. Q291 Mr O'Brien: Are you satisfied with the standards? Major Harris: We are working towards not just meeting the standards but exceeding the standards. One of the issues there is that the type of accommodation that people can expect to move into is of a lesser standard. It is about the standards right across the whole sector. Q292 Mr O'Brien: If a person is staying for one night, should they not have an adequate standard? Major Harris: Absolutely. Q293 Mr O'Brien: I will put it to you again, are the standards adequate? Major Harris: In the Salvation Army centres that we have, yes, I would suggest they are. Mr Parrington: The reason why is because we are a registered social landlord and we have been relatively active for the last 25 years, so a lot of our stock has only been produced over the last 25 years and there has been a programme of refurbishment and so within our sector the standards are quite high. Q294 Chairman: But there are quite a lot of hostels with very poor standards. Mr Parrington: Yes. Q295 Mr O'Brien: If we are going to have hostels and we are finding now that people are staying in hostels longer than what was planned, what can we do about it where the standards are sub‑standard in many instances? Major Harris: I think Mr Parrington has said that the relationship between the Salvation Army and the Salvation Army Housing Association has allowed standards to be raised. Mr Parrington: If you are talking about nationally and you are referring to the potential for some form of licensing or some form of standard, you have the Decent Home Standard in the RSL sector. My argument would be that within the RSL sector we should not find hostels that are sub‑standard because there is an obligation on RSLs to maintain them and there is a regulatory code which insists on that. Q296 Mr O'Brien: Are hostels adequate to accommodate all kinds of homeless people, families, young people or people who are heavily dependant on alcohol or drugs? Does one hostel accommodate all those people? Major Harris: It does not work well. Very often you find people with alcohol issues not really working well within the centre because of mixing with people with similar issues. What we have to do as hostel managers is to try and look at individual needs and work those through the best we can. I think for families it is a very short‑term solution, but very often the options to hostel accommodation are very inadequate. Q297 Mr O'Brien: I find very often a person who is homeless and who may be in a hostel is told by the local authority they will be given one reasonable offer and after that then there is no other option. Does that happen in your case and does that mean that the person stays longer in a hostel? Major Harris: More and more we are finding that the local authorities, where they are able, are giving a number of options and it is not a good place for somebody to move into who has a history of drug and alcohol abuse that they want to address. Q298 Mr O'Brien: Mr O'Shea, you nodded your head. Would you like to comment? Mr O'Shea: With hostels it varies significantly around the country. In some areas the council is very willing to offer a range of options and in others it is a case of that is it. As with any idea, it is all in the implementation of it and we have found for our clients it tends to be the bigger hostels which are the more problematic because you do get this ghettoisation that was talked about before, which is people just being lumped together and that is particularly problematic where you have drug and alcohol abuse because people are going from the prison into a hostel where all the people they were in prison with are now going to give them drugs. Q299 Mr O'Brien: Have you a view as to how large a hostel should be? Mr O'Shea: I have a personal view which I would say should be under 30, but they can be run successfully over that number. Major Harris: We could offer instances where the sort of service provision that could be offered is 40 plus and it can work. Q300 Chairman: Who runs these sub‑standard hostels? Mr O'Shea: Are you asking me about this? Q301 Chairman: You all nodded when we raised this question of sub‑standard hostels. Is it a significant issue, the standard of hostel accommodation? Mr Cavadino: It is a significant issue. In Nacro we run small hostels of a supportive kind which would not take in one property more than 20 people at the very maximum and usually considerably fewer than that. We have found in trying to house people in a range of other accommodation that there is strong and understandable resistance to going to some types of hostel where people feel, possibly rightly, that they will be among people who are trying to deal in drugs and trying to intimidate them. Q302 Chairman: Who is running these hostels which do not meet adequate standards? Mr Cavadino: In some cases we are talking about private sector operations. As Ian said earlier on, there are standards within the registered social landlord sector, there is regulation by the Housing Corporation, there are inspections by the Audit Commission and so on. Standards do vary, but there is an enforcement process there which is increasing standards and insisting on standards all the time. Q303 Mr O'Brien: Are they inspected by the Audit Commission? Mr Cavadino: Of housing associations, yes, but I was referring to private sector properties. Mr Parrington: The Audit Commission undertake an inspection from the customer services perspective of an association every three years and they are contracted to do that by the Housing Corporation. The Corporation also undertake an annual Housing Corporation assessment in terms of physical standards, customer services, financial viability and governance of every housing association. Q304 Chairman: This is the public housing sector in a sense as opposed to the private sector? Mr Parrington: Yes. Q305 Mr Betts: Priority needs categories, are they right or should they be changed? The Salvation Army suggested that everybody who is homeless ought to be given their statutory right to be rehoused. There are other arguments about ex‑offenders who have got mental illness problems having an automatic right to be rehoused. What are your views on this? Major Harris: I guess those representing any group of people would wish them to be prioritised. You have said, quite rightly, that individuals need to be recognised with their own needs. Recognising the scarce resources is the real issue for local authorities and one that we need to work with registered social landlords on, with the private sector and again I would say partnerships is a way of working through this. Not everybody can be prioritised because when you do that you then have to prioritise the priorities and we have got to find a way of doing that successfully in every area. Q306 Mr Betts: Why do you want to return to the statutory obligation to house everyone who is homeless then because that is clearly not practical? It means the most vulnerable are going to lose out because everyone is going to have the same rights. Major Harris: I do not think that we have addressed the interpretation of vulnerability sufficiently well because we tend to like to put people in boxes, so we say that ex‑offenders are vulnerable, single parents and the single homeless are vulnerable depending upon our perspective. There needs to be real work and investigation done about how we can meet the needs of the individuals who present and whilst looking at their situations and looking at their individual needs we need to see if there is a way of accessing appropriate services for those people. Q307 Mr Betts: One group we have not mentioned is the elderly. Is that an increasing problem? Do you get involved in that at all? Major Harris: We have 18 residential homes for the elderly. We are finding it increasingly difficult to fund those. We are finding that we are spending £2.5 million to supplement the income that comes from either the local authorities, social services or the individual. It will become more of a problem as more and more people grow older and are unable to sustain their independence. Q308 Mr Betts: There are people who are not a priority need but who have still got rights to advice and information. Is it your experience that local authorities are genuinely performing that role properly? Mr O'Shea: I would say again it is highly variable. When we did the national rehabilitation strategy we went to a lot of prisons to see what they were doing in terms of getting housing advice in there and there were some excellent examples and there were some very poor examples where the local authorities ignored what was going on. Q309 Mr Betts: Give us examples. Mr O'Shea: Portsmouth is an excellent example, there is lots going on in Holloway and Durham has won an award for its good work. Q310 Mr Betts: And the other side of it? Mr O'Shea: There are 47 prisons which have housing advice which is good and there are 138 prisons altogether. Nacro do some very good work with their resettlement programme. Q311 Mr Betts: In two‑thirds of them the local authorities are failing, are they? Mr O'Shea: There is just no housing advice. Q312 Mr Betts: Is that a failure of the prison authorities or the local authorities? Mr O'Shea: That is a tricky question. In my opinion it is the local authorities because at the end of the day they are the ones who can provide the housing when they are released. Q313 Mr Betts: Even the advice? Mr O'Shea: Yes. Q314 Mr Betts: So the local authorities are failing to provide advice in prison? Mr O'Shea: Yes. Major Harris: Success comes through partnerships. Portsmouth has a very good record of using a wide range of different voluntary public bodies to offer these sorts of advice services and it works. Q315 Chris Mole: If a prison has got a lot of people from out of their area, why would the local authority want to encourage them to come and settle in their area? Mr O'Shea: That is one of the big issues about prisoners, this issue of denial. I have heard of local authorities who say they do not have any prisoners returning to their area and if there is no prison in their area then it is not their problem. If you look at the offending rates across the country, it is fairly standard. You might be picking up somebody else's ex-prisoners today and somebody else will be picking up yours tomorrow and it is about cross‑co‑ordination. It is people not being willing to work with others and to take on different things that is the problem. It is reflected in a PCT where you are trying to get a doctor if you are from out of the area as well. There is a need for cross‑boundary working. Boroughs that do not have a prison in their area should be trying to do something too. Q316 Chris Mole: There is evidence that people from black and minority ethnic communities are likely to experience homelessness across the board. Is this something you find represented in your client groups, and how would you describe the specific needs that they might have? Mr Parrington: In certain centres we do find that. In Great Peter Street we have a centre where up to 70 per cent of the residents are from BME groups. In terms of other areas, in Swindon there is a high concentration of the Somalian population and in that centre we are up to approximately 40 per cent Somalians and as a result of that we have employed two Somalian speaking project workers, we have separate menu arrangements and separate rooms for meetings for the Somalians. We can be flexible in terms of some of the services that we supply, especially in terms of bringing in other agencies as well to assist us. They are the two main examples I would give you. Mr Cavadino: We are dealing with prisoners and black and minority ethnic people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. About 24 per cent of the male population and 31 per cent of the female prison population are black and minority ethnic people. About 27 per cent of our tenants are black and minority ethnic people. One of the issues that I think needs to be addressed by non‑statutory agencies as well as statutory agencies is the need to monitor every aspect of what they do, including both service delivery issues and staffing issues and to set targets to ensure that they are promoting race equality. The requirement under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act on public bodies to develop a race equality scheme listing all their functions and what they are going to do to ensure race equality is promoted and monitored does not apply to non‑statutory agencies. For example, it does not apply to registered charities. We have adopted a race equality scheme as a matter of good practice, but when we tried to get ideas from other charities through the National Council for Voluntary Organisations we found that very few other charities have done so. I think particularly where public money is being given to organisations that are providing housing it is important that the standard of the provider organisations should be monitored in relation to what they are doing to ensure race equality in all their operations. Like many statutory organisations, we have targets for the proportion of black and minority ethnic staff and managers that we have over a period of time, we have targets for the proportion of black and minority ethnic tenants that we have over a period of time, we do satisfaction surveys for tenants and we monitor those by ethnic group to ensure that the satisfaction of black and minority ethnic tenants is not significantly lower than it is for white tenants. We look at outcomes. We look, for example, at the proportion of people from different racial groups who are moved on successfully. That should be standard on the part of anybody who is providing accommodation and certainly with public money and yet it is not a requirement in the same way as the Race Relations (Amendment) Act is a requirement on public bodies. Mr Parrington: That is exactly the same as within the RSL sector with one additional target, which is that we also measure the quality of accommodation to ensure that the quality is not directed at one particular category as well. Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence. |