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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 428-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS MONday 7 MARCH 2005
PROGRESS IN TACKLING HOMELESSNESS
OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER
DAME MAVIS McDONALD, MS TERRIE ALAFAT and MR NEIL O'CONNOR
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 138
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral evidence Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts on Monday 7 March 2005 Members present: Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair Mr David Curry Mr Brian Jenkins Jim Sheridan Jon Trickett Mr Alan Williams ________________ Sir John Bourn KCB, Comptroller and Auditor General, and Mr David Corner, National Audit Office, further examined. Ms Paula Diggle, Second Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, further examined. REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: MORE THAN A ROOF: PROGRESS IN TACKLING HOMELESSNESS [HC286] Memorandum submitted by Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dame Mavis McDonald, DCB, Permanent Secretary, Ms Terrie Alafat, Director, Homelessness and Housing Support Directorate, and Mr Neil O'Connor, Divisional Manager, Homelessness Policy and Legislation Division, examined. Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts, where today we are looking at the subject of helping the homeless and work of the Homelessness and Housing Support Directorate. We are joined once again by Dame Mavis McDonald, who is the Permanent Secretary at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Would you like to introduce your colleagues? Dame Mavis McDonald: On my right is Terrie Alafat, who is the Head of the Directorate responsible for homelessness and housing support, and on my left is Neil O'Connor, head of the division that is responsible for the Homelessness Policy and Legislation Division. Q2 Chairman: Thank you, Dame Mavis. You wrote to me on 25 February about our hearing. I will refer to that letter so that we are completely up to date. Am I right in saying that the Government's own review for homelessness, that is the Barker Review, has told us that 400,000 new homes are need to deal with homelessness? Dame Mavis McDonald: The table, which is from the Barker Review in the NAO report, sets out Kate Barker's own view of housing need as a whole; it is not necessarily homeless. It draws on earlier work that Alan Holmans had carried out, and it is based on a series of estimates, in particular those for what are traditionally called "hidden homeless" and some of the data on hostels. It is a reasonable estimate ----- Q3 Chairman: So the estimate of 400,000 is right. You are happy with that estimate, are you? Dame Mavis McDonald: I am not saying it is right; I am saying it is reasonable methodology ----- Q4 Chairman: That was the estimate given by Barker. In Homes for All the target figure you published there, I think I am right in saying give the letter you sent to us, is 75,000 by 2008. Is that right? Dame Mavis McDonald: That is 75,000 new social lettings, new social buildings, plus the report covers an additional 40,000, which are for key workers and other forms of shared equity, shared ownership ----- Q5 Chairman: But you see the point I am making. Your own review identifies the shortfall - this is the Barker Review - of 400,000, but the target that you are setting, which we may not meet, is 75,000. Is that not a massive shortfall? Dame Mavis McDonald: I think it would be a shortfall if you were looking simply at some of the figures in our three-year strategy over time, and the Government's programme as set out in Homes for All after 2016 takes you very close to the Kate Barker annual figures for social housing. One of the things, which I qualified in my first answer, about the Kate Barker estimates is that nobody has got a very reliable figure for what are called hidden homeless; that is those people who are at home who might want to set up house on their own, but that could include people who potentially could buy in the market if the market changes who might not be able to at the moment; it is not necessarily those just those who would need help into social rented accommodation; it can cover the whole spectrum of market opportunities. Q6 Chairman: At the moment we have 100,000 people in temporary accommodation. Do you agree with that? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q7 Chairman: In Homes for All, which you refer to in your letter, you aim to halve the number of temporary accommodation by 2010. But it is right, is it, that some local authorities like Lambeth have made leasing arrangements that last for a number of years, and they might have difficulty in breaking these arrangements? That might have an impact on your ability to meet that target. Dame Mavis McDonald: We have a number of thoughts about how we might meet that target. Some of it obviously includes re-visiting and restructuring the nature of those leases, if landlords are willing to do so; and we do have some examples of where, following the bed and breakfast initiative, local authorities have been able to renegotiate leases that were very short term into something much longer term, which they can use in a much more flexible way. Q8 Chairman: Let us look again at figure 16 in the Comptroller General's report, on page 40, which shows the progress that you made. You will see that by March 2004 you had almost conquered this problem. There were very few families with children in bed and breakfast, and there were virtually none in bed-and-breakfast accommodation for over six weeks. However, you see the figures starting to rise. I have been told that one of the reasons for this is that in the new statutory framework, which is supposed to make it pretty well illegal for families to be put into bed-and-breakfast accommodation, there are various exemptions that local authorities can apply. They are using those exemptions, and that is why these numbers are creeping up again. Is that right? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. We do not necessarily expect them to continue to rise, though. We are monitoring them very closely ourselves and we are hopeful that when the next year-on-year figures appear very shortly they will show those figures coming down. The exemptions were introduced at consultation with local authorities, who were looking for some practical leeway. Case example 2 on page 41 of the report shows for example the kind of circumstance which in the interests of the family the local authority took the judgment that it was more appropriate to keep them where they were for a little longer rather than meet the absolute deadline of six weeks. Q9 Chairman: But you see the point I am making. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q10 Chairman: The statutory framework was supposed to make it virtually illegal for this to happen, and in fact made it even worse. Dame Mavis McDonald: I think the statutory framework gives much more rights to those who are in bed-and-breakfast accommodation than was there previously, and increases the incentive on local authorities to work with those families to work out what the best option is; so one would not envisage lots of exemptions being put in place if there had not been a discussion with those concerned about the ----- Q11 Chairman: Let us move on to where those families move to from bed and breakfast. We all accept what it says about bed and breakfast. Could you please look at paragraph 2.24 on page 44? There are mixed reviews, and some people are happier, as you would expect, but the last bullet point mentions that people have moved into three-bedroom flats in a run-down Victorian mansion block with a defective front door, low light levels in some rooms and tiny kitchens. How do we ensure that people are not moved out of bed-and-breakfast into poor accommodation? Dame Mavis McDonald: We cannot essentially make sure in every single case. We would expect the local authorities to be looking for an improvement in making such a move. What Ministers have said they want to do, as my letter said and the Comptroller says, is to have a targeted programme of reduction of the numbers living in temporary accommodation, alongside the completion of some work we have already put in hand, which is to strengthen the statutory guidance on the quality of temporary accommodation which it is acceptable for local authorities to use. We shall talk about light and space amongst other things. Q12 Chairman: Can I just ask you about rough sleepers. There is reference to this in paragraphs 2.37 and 2.39, and we find it at page 48. There seems to be some difference of opinion about dealing with rough sleepers and the amount of information we have about their move-on accommodation, which is obviously vital. Westminster Council, which has by far the highest number of rough sleepers, has one view; the Greater London Authority appears to have another view. How can we develop an effective strategy when we do not know enough about where these people are going on to? Dame Mavis McDonald: We agree with the recommendation in the report that we need to understand more about what is going on here. There is no difference between anybody that it would be helpful to have a larger supply, but also we need to understand more about why people are walking away from hostel accommodation and potentially the support services that would help them to move into accommodation, and they would be obviously more stable in the longer term. We are proposing to do some work on that. Ms Alafat: In the five-year strategy and the plan we published, we announced a 90 million programme for hostels, and although that is capital investment it is not just about investing in the quality of the accommodation; as part of our hostels improvement programme we are going to be looking in detail at the services provided in the hostels, so that we can ensure we have a more positive outcome and people believe in hostels, which means moving on and staying in their tenancies. The 90 million is there to help us change the very nature of that service and improve it. Q13 Chairman: We fist looked at this issue in recent history 14 years ago, where we asked for better research on the subject. We last looked at it in 2002. If you look at paragraph 3.18 on page 54 you will see that there can still be much better working between your department and the Ministry of Health. Paragraph 3.47 on page 62 at figure 29 you can see the whole series of areas where there are shortcomings. This is pre-eminently, is it not, an area of government where joined-up government is vital? However, you are still not getting your act together. Dame Mavis McDonald: We have a large number of examples - quite a few of them in the report itself - showing that we have been working across government collectively to develop different approaches, and actually working in a much more cross-cutting way than both your original report and the joining-up study, which I was involved in myself. I think we agree there is a lot more to be done, but we would say that over that period of time we have learnt an awful lot more about the circumstances of those people who present themselves as homeless, and we are distinguishing and understanding more about the basic supply issues but also about the individual circumstances and problems that face those who do have assistance with their housing. Increasingly, we know that those people are likely to include those who are amongst the most vulnerable groups in a variety of ways. We would say we still need to know more, but we would say we have learnt a lot. We are working together much better. Jeff Rucker has been chairing, for the five-year plan, a group of inter-departmental ministers, who will be coming forward very shortly with proposals for taking the agenda forward on the basis of both your Select Committee analysis and our report. Q14 Jim Sheridan: What criteria do you use for "vulnerable person"? Dame Mavis McDonald: We would include everybody who is now accepted as in priority need under homelessness legislation, and also under the Supporting People Programme, which we also run, where we have definitions of eligibility for those who need help to continue to live in their own housing or need support to get access to housing. Q15 Jim Sheridan: To me that is jargon. What do you mean by that? Dame Mavis McDonald: The Supporting People Programme is the programme by which we fund local authorities. This is a central government programme, a cross-cutting programme, which funds local authorities to help people that range from the frail elderly to a variety of categories such as ex-offenders or children being in care, to access housing. It pays for the extra costs of personal support to stay in housing. It does not just pay for the rent; it pays to support those people. It might be in helping access to employment, access to physical aids to enhance the building, so that somebody who is old and frail can ----- Q16 Jim Sheridan: So vulnerable people would include single parents? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q17 Jim Sheridan: The reason I am asking - and I am sure other colleagues get the same complaints and inquiries about people who jump the queue, and other people have to wait for housing - simply because a young woman becomes pregnant and then she jumps the housing queue, which causes a problem amongst other people. Are they vulnerable people? Dame Mavis McDonald: Under the framework of the legislation, somebody would have to be demonstratively homeless unintentionally in order to access housing. You see from the figures in the report the number of people asking for help is significantly larger than those who get immediate access to housing; so somebody who had adequate accommodation and was a single parent at the moment would not necessarily go through that hoop, but there are some significant numbers of single parents who do get help through the housing strategy. Q18 Jim Sheridan: My experience is that the young woman becomes pregnant, gets a house, is a vulnerable person and the bidie in, as we call it in Scotland, gets back in again with the single mum. Do you have any evidence that that happens or is it just a myth? Dame Mavis McDonald: I am not aware. Can I just check with my colleagues? Ms Alafat: One of the new requirements of the Act in 2002 was that local authorities would have to look more broadly at homelessness housing need in their area, not just those that were statutorily homeless. The purpose of that is to try to take earlier action so as to prevent homelessness from taking place, so there are people in the community that may not be vulnerable under the Act, but we expect local authorities to look at those needs more generally. Q19 Jim Sheridan: It causes a great deal of frustration amongst my constituents. Would you look at paragraph 2.33 on page 47? "The Directorate has collected information and commissioned research which suggests that the number of people sleeping rough over the course of a year may be ten times the number on a single night." Does that mean your annual figures are not inconsistent with what is happening on a single night? Dame Mavis McDonald: It means that we acknowledge that more people sleep rough than are just counted on any night. That is just a snapshot on a night, but across a year there will be different individuals who are sometimes sleeping rough and sometimes not. There will be a flow across the year. We have evidence that some people will possibly stay in a hostel for part of the year, but then will go out again and move somewhere else in the summer, so there is a different pattern across the year. The count on one night underestimates the total number of people who may be sleeping rough in any one year, is basically what we are saying. I think this methodology is now largely accepted by everybody, and the NAO helped us with it, but it is just an attempt to be perfectly honest about what is going on. Q20 Jim Sheridan: It is not an absolute figure of how many homeless people we are talking about. Dame Mavis McDonald: In terms of rough sleepers, unless we counted every night we would not necessarily get that figure. This methodology has been accepted most of the stakeholder groups and myself and the NAO. Q21 Jim Sheridan: Is there any impact on homelessness, particularly in the south-east, where the main problem is, in the London area, or any problem with the number of migrant workers coming to live and work in Britain? Are there sufficient homes or are they regarded as rough sleepers or homeless? Dame Mavis McDonald: Can I ask Neil to answer that in detail? Anybody who is out on the street, regardless of their source of origin, would be counted as a rough sleeper. Q22 Jim Sheridan: Does it create a problem for you if, as anticipated and some of the popular press suggest, we are going to be flooded by migrant workers? Will that put additional pressure on homelessness issues? Mr O'Connor: There are some different issues here. There are issues around eligibility for statutory assistance and there are different levels of eligibility for people from abroad; but in terms of rough sleeping obviously there is a concern about that happening, but there is little evidence of it happening to date. In Central London, for example, counts have found some migrants coming in and sleeping rough, but tending to sleep rough for a few days and then moving on and getting work and finding accommodation. Q23 Jim Sheridan: Permanent accommodation? Mr O'Connor: As far as we know. Dame Mavis McDonald: They have not come and asked for help from the local authorities. Q24 Jim Sheridan: We just assume then that they have found permanent accommodation. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, if they do not ask. Q25 Jim Sheridan: Is there a genuine concern that some of the bed-and-breakfast facilities are way, way below the standard that some of us would accept? I am aware that in Scotland anyway that a number of landlords have already been prosecuted for providing bed-and-breakfast facilities that are just unacceptable. In many cases there are safety concerns. Do we carry out checks on bed-and-breakfast facilities? Dame Mavis McDonald: We do not centrally; local authorities do. Ms Alafat: As you know, in England because we have accepted that B&B is the most inappropriate accommodation, that has been our whole push - to reduce that. We continue to push local authorities to reduce that, and they do have a statutory duty to provide appropriate suitable accommodation. It is through local authorities that that is monitored and they do already have responsibilities through the Housing Act and through their environmental health programmes. In authorities in London for many many years they have had something called B&B standards, which they have implemented themselves, so obviously we want to try and continue the push on that, but there are some mechanisms in place to check on standards. Q26 Jim Sheridan: Another concern in terms of bed-and-breakfast accommodation is that there is evidence there is a large element of fraud, and that people are claiming to live in B&B, and landlords are claiming to have people in B&B that do not actually live there. Is there any evidence that that is a concern, or is it something we evaluate and monitor? Ms Alafat: Because of the nature of the legislation, local authorities are placing the households in bed-and-breakfast, and we make a point of saying to them that they should be doing visits, and home visits as well when someone applies as being homeless. As far as we know, there is no overall evidence of fraud that has come to our attention. Obviously, that does not mean it does not happen. Dame Mavis McDonald: I think we need to check with our colleagues in DWP whether they are finding significant evidence, but it is not an issue they have particularly raised with us. They have worked with us to increase incentives to not use bed-and-breakfast but to use temporary accommodation. Q27 Jim Sheridan: I do not know what your relationship is with your counterparts in Scotland, but I know the Scottish Executive has set a very ambitious target that everyone in priority need will have permanent accommodation. There is extreme pressure on local authorities. Do you have any idea if that is attainable? Dame Mavis McDonald: I am afraid I do not know whether it is attainable in Scotland. I think we could say, because of what we know about the current status in London and the South East, that that would be a very difficult target to meet in the short term. Q28 Jim Sheridan: That mission statement you do not think you can fulfil in England. Dame Mavis McDonald: Ministers have just announced that what they are targeting in the first instance is a reduction in the numbers in temporary accommodation by 50% by 2010. Q29 Jon Trickett: Increasing homelessness as a historical trend I suppose correlates to some extent with the increasing number of households and the breakdown of the so-called traditional households. It also correlates to the sale of council houses, and the failure to make capital receipts available to councils so that they can build more houses. Is this latter point a factor in increasing homelessness? Dame Mavis McDonald: It is a factor in the decline in supply of available social rented lettings for people who are coming to local authorities asking for assistance. Q30 Jon Trickett: Therefore, it is a factor in saying that the housing supply available to people who need rented accommodation is less than it was. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, it is a factor. It is not the only factor, as the report explains. Q31 Jon Trickett: I am not suggesting it is. Dame Mavis McDonald: It is a factor. Q32 Jon Trickett: Are you as a department promoting council house sales? Dame Mavis McDonald: What ministers have done, as you know, is to change some of the ground rules on right-to-buy sales in the areas where there is most pressure on social housing stock, in order to see the availability of social rented lettings for local authorities. But there are a variety of programmes, including the increase in new-build programmes that the Chairman referred to, and the PFI programme that is now available. Q33 Jon Trickett: Can you tell us how much the social rented sector has diminished over the last ten years, say? Dame Mavis McDonald: There are some examples in the report and in Homes for All, which is the five-year plan. The best estimate we have used is around 22,000 a year when the right-to-buy sales levels are around 70-75%. Q34 Jon Trickett: Is it true, though, that by encouraging these fancy ALMOs and other devices, councils dispose of their property to housing companies or whatever, and what is happening is an increase in the number of people buying because they are afraid that for whatever reason - they might be afraid of the new-fangled landlords have been created and so they have decided to buy? Is it not the case that they are accelerating council house sales? Dame Mavis McDonald: The number of council house sales has accelerated quite markedly over the last three to four years. Some of it can be related to people taking it up on transfer; they know there is security that they will have a refurbished property as part of the ALMO programme. Some of it is associated with the very fast rise in the property market values more generally in London and the South-East. Q35 Jon Trickett: Yes, and probably climbing interest rates as well; but altogether I am interested in your policies. It is your department's policy to sell council houses and not to make capital receipts available in general terms to re-build, and secondly to allow, or even encourage perhaps, councils to dispose of properties, which in itself is accelerating the diminution of the rented sector, and thereby in a way there is a correlation between diminution of the rented sector and the increase in homelessness. It seems to me you are pursuing contradictory policies. Dame Mavis McDonald: Ministers have made it clear that their initial choices in 1997 for use of capital receipts was to improve the quality of the existing stock that was owned by local authorities and other social landlords. They have now said, in their latest proposals, that they want to accelerate the scheme of new supply through a variety of routes. Some of the propositions in Homes for All will make it easier for local authorities to access the receipts from sales into shared ownership particularly. Q36 Jon Trickett: I want to move on to a different subject. If you look at map 3 on page 6, it shows that in my own area, Yorkshire and Humber, it has the largest number of households accepted as homeless outside of London - 7.7 households per 1000. Why is that? Ms Alafat: It is the case that Yorkshire and Humber and also the North-East where homelessness has increased at a higher rate than in other parts of the country in recent years. The explanation, as far as we can tell looking at the causes of homelessness and the categories, is that there is no doubt that in those two areas there has been an increase in 16 to 17‑year olds, young people; and that is something that we have recognised working with the government office there; and indeed the government office has been leading various discussions to look at what can be done to prevent homelessness among that group. That was a category that was added in the legislation. The second issue, which comes up more often in Yorkshire and Humber, is the issue around asylum-seekers. Nationally, asylum-seekers are given leave to remain and have the right of access to housing in about 4 of acceptances. However, in the most recent year it was at 6%, and in 2002/2003 it was as high as 12%. That is one of the reasons why, as the report says, we are working very closely to try to prevent homelessness for these groups of people. There are some differences by regions. Q37 Jon Trickett: Are there not empty buildings scattered around Yorkshire and Humber which have been converted to take asylum-seekers? Ms Alafat: There is an issue here about where we have low demand areas, especially if you look at the other maps in the NAO report. What is interesting is the pressures on temporary accommodation are not as high as the acceptance levels in some of these areas, and there is a difference here between people coming through the local authority to get assistance, and therefore accepted as homeless, and then being able to provide housing. We are trying to prevent them from having to go through the homelessness route to begin with, so that is not the only route into helping them into housing. Q38 Jon Trickett: Can you explain map 12 on page 34? If you compare that to the map we were just looking at, it is counter-intuitive. On map 3, Yorkshire and Humber has the highest number of households homeless per 1000, apart from London, but on map 12 we discover that for Yorkshire and Humber there is a very small number, 1.1 per 1000, in terms of the accommodation; but the heading of the map is, "the use of temporary accommodation tends to be concentrated in those parts of the country with greater general housing supply pressures". If homelessness is an index of that, you will expect a correlation to take place between the number of households in temporary accommodation and the number of homeless households, so why does it not correlate in that way? Ms Alafat: There are two different things here. In Yorkshire and Humber, if you are a young person or someone else who needs help in your housing, you would go to your local authority, and if you are vulnerable and fulfil all the requirements, you could be accepted as in need of housing. They could then provide you with a council flat or housing association flat almost straight away; so the numbers in temporary accommodation would be very low. If you compared it with London, where we know there is a housing supply problem, as well as obviously social and welfare needs, then you see that we also have the pressure. That is why the supply is also linked. It is a matter of who becomes homeless because they have social issues, and then the housing supply issue as well. Q39 Jon Trickett: If the number of households in temporary accommodation is a function of relatively plentiful supply of accommodation, how is it that we have the highest number of households that are homeless in the area? It does not make sense. Ms Alafat: We cannot be certain, but we think, and we have been told by local authorities, that the 2002 Act, which required local authorities to develop homelessness strategies, also in effect raised their game generally on homelessness. In other words, they had to look at what they were doing in terms of homelessness generally, and it became a much higher profile in local authorities. There was an expansion in need categories. We are not really surprised in some respects that in parts of the country where perhaps homelessness was not on top of the agenda, that authorities changed their approach. What we are quite keen to see is for those numbers to come down. If we can prevent someone from going through the homelessness route to meet their housing needs, that is what we should be trying to do. Q40 Jon Trickett: I am not sure I understood exactly what you were saying, but perhaps you could send us an illuminating note if you have a look again at the question. My final question is on the private rented sector, which you seem to rely on very largely. It does surprise me that that is the case. I do not understand why the housing associations are not making a larger contribution towards alleviating the homelessness problem, given that they are recipients of very large amounts of taxpayers' money. Can you explain why we are using private landlords rather than housing associations? Dame Mavis McDonald: We are using private landlords across the country, but much more in areas of highest pressure, because there is huge pressure on the social rented sector generally, not just through the homelessness route, in London and the South-East, so there are long waiting-lists for access. There are people living currently in accommodation which is no longer suited for their needs - they might have got a small apartment, but now have a growing family. Both housing associations and local authorities have to trade off what the requirements are across their existing tenants, other people on the housing register, and a homelessness provision. In London particularly, where the numbers are the highest, there has to be a lot of cross-borough working in order to achieve places for people who present themselves, so there is a time lag there. Some of the figures in the report show that in London it takes longer for example to move on from temporary accommodation into a permanent flat or house than it does elsewhere. We have issued guidelines, which we work on with the National Housing Federation to try and get best practice developed. It is really much more about joint working between local authorities and housing associations. Q41 Mr Curry: Barker was not really about homelessness at all, was it? It was set up by the Chancellor to worker out how the British housing market, with its volatility and its history of significant price rises and house price inflation, could make it behave more like the continental market and therefore make it possible for the United Kingdom to contemplate membership of the euro. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, I think against a context where the total supply of new housing, not just the social rented supply, but that developed by the private sector itself, seemed not to be responding to demand. Q42 Mr Curry: The point I am making is that Barking is a red herring more or less in the context we are discussing today. Dame Mavis McDonald: I think the analysis confirmed what we already knew in ----- Q43 Mr Curry: It is also true, is it not, that - Mr Trickett and I are both Yorkshire Members of Parliament - if you look at social housing in Yorkshire, particularly council housing in places like Sheffield, the fact is that there is an aging population; demography is working against social housing, is it not, and there are significant blocks of uninhabited housing? The need there is to demolish and regenerate. There are two housing markets so it is not surprising that accommodation in conventional social housing is more available. Dame Mavis McDonald: That is right. I can check in relation to Pathfinder because Sheffield for example has significant problems of low demand and have done more work projecting forward. Q44 Mr Curry: Sheffield Council baled out. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q45 Mr Curry: Looking at map 3 again, are you aware of some research that has come up in the last few days talking about comparative expectation in education and, for example, meals in schools? In the north a high proportion of parents in the country believed that the school dinner was the main meal of the day. How does homelessness correlate to more general indices of social deprivation - unemployment, per capita income, free school meals - which is a standard although I suspect not particularly accurate indicator of deprivation? How does that correlate? Dame Mavis McDonald: There is a higher correlation in the areas of lower demand than there is in London, but there is a correlation even in London and the South-East. Q46 Mr Curry: You would expect it in London and the South-East because London is a bit of everything rolled into one. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q47 Mr Curry: Therefore, you might be expected to find more homelessness in areas of less prosperity, if you like. Is that true, just a statement to start with? Dame Mavis McDonald: If you take the broader definition of homelessness that we have under the latest Act, then those categories of problems that individuals have correlate readily with other factors pointing to deprivation that we know about and we measure - issues around skills and education, for example, or various categories of crime including domestic violence; they have all shown that you get a clustering effect in places. Q48 Mr Curry: Can I ask you about local housing needs surveys upon which local authorities often develop their housing plans. I get those in my cottage in Yorkshire, and they are terribly aspirational - "would you like to live somewhere else to where you are living?" Have you ever done work into introducing rigorous methodology and intellectual rigour into these surveys, which are the vaguest things you could possibly imagine at the moment? Dame Mavis McDonald: As the report says, that was one of the issues around the quality of the homelessness strategies, that there were aspirations without having targeted delivery approach to what they can achieve with the resources that might be available. We have found housing strategies very mixed. There are some very good ones from some of the better housing authorities. Q49 Mr Curry: Is there a template for the actual assessment of what is meant by "need" in the context of local housing? Ms Alafat: Yes. When we first asked local authorities to do homelessness strategies, we did produce quite a detailed guidance in terms of what they should be doing as part of that. We have now had the results of the evaluation and we are continuing. Obviously, where the independent evaluation has pointed out problems and gaps, we are continuing to work with authorities and it was not just a matter of writing strategies, but getting that better. They will be obviously writing another strategy and we are looking at that now, but there was guidance initially. Dame Mavis McDonald: There is also guidance on general local authority housing strategies including the need to look right across the spectrum of housing requirements in their area, not just the rented sector. Q50 Mr Curry: Are you aware of the research done by the Children's Society into children who run away from home? Dame Mavis McDonald: I am not personally aware of that. Q51 Mr Curry: Last week the Children's Society produced a report on children who run away from home, which indicated that about 100,000 young persons a year quit home. Many are rough sleeping, and girls very often find themselves pushed into some sort of prostitution. We had examples of the young people talking about their experience. Some pilots are taking place, I imagine done by your department - which would make sense, and if not done by your department then there is a lack of joined-upped ness! Dame Mavis McDonald: The Social Exclusion Unit has done one on young runaways, but I have been looking very closely around the DfES around the Every Child Matters agenda. Ms Alafat: Because of the rough sleeping targets and the Rough Sleeping Unit, a lot of attention in the early days was focused on just that. Our rough sleeping counts are not showing that happening any longer and that is partly because over the years, with the DfES and others we have funded specific services for young people. The other thing that has come out of our programme on prevention and funding local authorities has been that a large number of them have put in place family mediation schemes where they are basically trying to prevent the young person from leaving home at an early stage and becoming homeless. We are still doing quite a lot to try to prevent that from happening. That is not to say ----- Q52 Mr Curry: But the results of this indicate that people - because some families were there as well - mothers were saying they were not supported, quite often intimidated and quite often had been blamed for what was happening, and some of them came from very disrupted and dislocated households, as one can imagine. As you said you wanted to get at the root causes of homelessness to prevent it before it started happening ----- Dame Mavis McDonald: I think we were simply saying we were not aware of the details. Q53 Mr Curry: Would you have a look at it and drop us a note, which would be very helpful? There is an argument about how many people are homeless. As you said, quite rightly, some people are permanently homeless and there is an awful lot of casual homelessness and people who have some sort of roof but which may be unsatisfactory at times of the year, or maybe it is just dosing down with people. There is a very high incidence of people who are mentally ill and on drugs who are generally medically debilitated. What progress have you made to address these related issues for people to whom it is irrelevant whether there is a house for them or not, because they are utterly utterly incompetent in the true sense of that word when it comes to their own lives, managing a budget and sustaining themselves in a house? Dame Mavis McDonald: That is where you have to look at the Supporting People Programme alongside support as defined by the homelessness legislation, because that programme is now clarifying where there is need for that kind of support in a much more specific way at local authority level than we have previously seen before. That programme can work alongside both the homelessness programme, which is relatively small in volume, and the bricks and mortar programme - that kind of personally targeted approach to help those kinds of individuals. We really only started that programme this current financial year - we are into year 2 next year. We are still working with the Audit Commission and are carrying out our own research to find out if there is a mismatch. Q54 Mr Curry: The Housing Bill introduced an extraordinarily complex process of multiple tiers of registration, and registration of HMOs. Presumably that has come into force; or is it still waiting to be triggered? Dame Mavis McDonald: This is the licensing provisions. I think it is about to come into force, but I would have to check. Q55 Mr Curry: Do you believe that will be of assistance in the ability for the private rented sector to play its role in housing people in need? Dame Mavis McDonald: A lot of local authorities were very anxious for that legislation to be put on the books because it gives them the capacity to have much more influence over the quality of the private rented sector lettings, but we will ourselves have to promote it more generally across the country where people have not thought about it very much, particularly potentially some of those areas where they have not felt they had a homelessness problem. As you know, there is a whole variety of areas like seaside towns where you get the juxtaposition of two things coming together. Q56 Chairman: In that line of questioning, you were asked again about the Barker Review. Would you please look at page 29, paragraph 1.6? "The Barker Review highlighted the considerable number of households in need of affordable housing. It is suggested that over 400,000 households are in need of self-contained, secure and affordable accommodation in England alone. It states in figure 7 that households in temporary accommodation are 94,000; households in "stop-gap" accommodation i.e., staying with family or friends, is 154,000; households in shared dwellings are 53,000; and single homeless people, hostel residents et cetera are 110,000, making a total of 411,000. The source is Delivering Stability: Securing our British Housing Needs -Kate Barker, 2004. Does the Government accept those figures in detail? Dame Mavis McDonald: What the Government accepted was that this was a reasonable estimate and a reasonable methodology. We do not know the precise make-up of our 154 because we do not have a database that is picking up every one of us who might have a child staying with us who, if they could afford it, would move on elsewhere. We understood, when talking to Kate Barker about her report, that it is about whether you can access the housing market in any of these forms. Those figures include people who might normally be expecting to look either to rent themselves or to move into shared ownership, or to buy if they can afford to and the market conditions are right. Q57 Chairman: My point is that you do not know exactly what constitutes the 154,000 but you appear to broadly accept those figures. I still do not understand the letter you sent to me on 25 February. If you look at Sustainable Communities: Homes for All, the latest Government announcement, and the summary you have helpfully provided for the Committee, two thirds of the way down you say that your policies now will increase the supply of new social rented homes by 50% by 2008, providing 75,000 new social rented homes over the next three years. I still do not understand, given the figures you have broadly accepted and which you have signed up to in this report - and the Committee has got to have something to work on and we can only work on the report in front of us - how the analysis you made which is summarised in this letter to us, can possibly meet the need. Dame Mavis McDonald: The need in relation to the kinds of needs we are talking about in paragraph 7 are not simply being met by the new social rented homes figure; the programmes about affordable housing for key workers and first-time buyers, which are not included in those figures, which will add another 40,000 units over the same three-year period, address that issue, and there are other programmes such as ----- Q58 Chairman: Just total them up and take it slowly, because it is absolutely vital - all the Government programmes that we have got here. We have the figures from the Barker Review, and I want you to go through, one by one, what you are hoping to provide - the various categories and what it adds up to, please. Can you do that now, please? Dame Mavis McDonald: Not against the table in paragraph 7, no, because ministers do not set out the framework in their plan to say, "we are going to address this issue in quite this way". Q59 Chairman: It is a Government-sponsored report. That identifies - and you have told me that you do not disagree with it - what is the need. I want you now to go through, item by item, what housing you are providing. Then we can work out whether it will meet the need which is there in figure 7. Dame Mavis McDonald: We are providing through the new social rented homes programme by the Housing Corporation 75,000 houses over the next three years and more if we can get it. Q60 Chairman: How will that meet the need which Kate Barker has identified? Dame Mavis McDonald: That is not meeting the need in Kate Barker's ----- Q61 Chairman: That is not meeting the need. Thank you. Dame Mavis McDonald: Because there are a variety of other programmes and policies which --- Q62 Chairman: Of those variety of programmes exactly how many houses or use of accommodation will be provided? Dame Mavis McDonald: The new 75,000; another new figure for key workers and for low-cost shared ownership schemes. Q63 Chairman: How many is that? Dame Mavis McDonald: That is 40,000. Q64 Chairman: So you have 75,000 and 40,000. Dame Mavis McDonald: And another 15,000 on the first-time buyer programmes. Those are all new. I do not have a precise figure for the private finance programme for local government because we have not got their responses in yet, but there is a programme which has been made available to them on which they can ----- Q65 Chairman: How many is that going to provide us? Dame Mavis McDonald: I do not know. Q66 Chairman: We are up to 130,000 so far. Dame Mavis McDonald: Ministers did not set out to make these sums add up to 400,000. Q67 Chairman: Well, why on earth did you commission this review by Kate Barker then? Did you disagree with the review? Dame Mavis McDonald: Ministers commissioned the review by Kate Barker ----- Q68 Chairman: I am sorry, but we have a massive shortfall. It is not your fault, but if we are going to have a proper inquiry we must at least understand the rules of the game. Dame Mavis McDonald: But a significant part of that shortfall, as Kate Barker herself says, is because the private-sector developers are not supplying a part of the market. Q69 Chairman: So what are you going to do about it? Dame Mavis McDonald: We have a big competition for a ₤60,000 home ----- Q70 Chairman: How many homes is that going to provide? Dame Mavis McDonald: We are only just about to launch the competition, but we already know that we have got 3,000 extra units of housing courtesy of English Partnerships and this programme in London; and the Mayor of London has said he thinks he can provide ----- Q71 Chairman: These people are going to be able to afford ₤60,000, are they? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, quite a lot of people can afford ₤60,000. Q72 Chairman: These people identified - these people in temporary accommodation, in stop-gap accommodation and shared dwellings, and homeless - they can afford this, and you are going to provide 3,000 houses anyway. Dame Mavis McDonald: I am sorry, but I am clearly not getting the point over about the people who are in what is described as stop-gap housing here. That is an assessment of anybody who might want some accommodation which is different from the one they have got and happen to be sharing with a friend or parent who might want independent accommodation. It is not based on any huge great survey based on fact; it is based on statistical assumptions that Alan Holmans started to make in 1996. Within that bracket there are a whole variety of potential options for people, depending on what their income and aspirations are, and it includes purchasing in the private sector. Q73 Chairman: I do not think you are anywhere near, Dame Mavis, meeting the need identified by Kate Barker. It may not be your fault, because if you look at paragraph 1.5 you will see this: "The Barker Review of Housing Supply published in 2004, noted that the number of social houses built in the United Kingdom fell from around 42,700 per year in 1995-95 to around 21,000 in 2002-2003. It also found that, while there had been a considerable increase in spending on social housing (from ₤800 million to over ₤1.4 billion) rising land prices and the need to improve existing stock meant that the rate of new supply had continued to decline." I think that is the problem that is facing you. You simply cannot meet the need identified by Kate Barker, and the programmes that you have mentioned to me in this line of questioning add up to 130,000, when there is a need for 411,000. Dame Mavis McDonald: As I said, ministers did not say in their plan that they were trying to meet Kate Barker's 400,000. Q74 Chairman: They may not have said that ----- Dame Mavis McDonald: There is a cumulative backlog of need over a significant number of years. What they have said is that they will increase the annual output of new supply quite significantly over the period of the next spending review, and it might be helpful if I over you a note to pull to get ----- Chairman: It might be very helpful. Jon Trickett: When there are problems - will it then be deducted from the total number of houses which have been sold each year, which the witness said was 22,000 a year, and so we get a net increase in the rented sector, which is substantially less than the figures you have just given? Q75 Mr Curry: And deduct from that the number of houses which might become available had they not been sold, rather than lived in by people who bought them. Dame Mavis McDonald: The 22,000, just to clarify, is our best estimate of those that might have been available for re-letting. People have always assumed that a large number of people who bought their own houses would stay in them. Q76 Mr Jenkins: Were you very pleased with the report when you read it, or did anything cause you concern - or are you just familiar with it? Dame Mavis McDonald: I think the report was a fair assessment of what had happened and what was improving, and what still needed to be improved. Q77 Mr Jenkins: On the recommendations, is there any recommendation you felt is difficult to implement? Dame Mavis McDonald: I think all of the recommendations are quite difficult to implement. One is because we are dealing with some of the most vulnerable and difficult health groups in society, and secondly because we are not working in a context that is staying still. The housing market is changing all the time. The numbers we have to deal with are increasing all the time and the pattern is changing. Q78 Mr Jenkins: Are there any recommendations that you do not want implemented? Dame Mavis McDonald: No, because we would not have signed up to the report if we had felt it was not appropriate for us to do so. Q79 Mr Jenkins: So we have great expectations that all the recommendations will be implemented fully. Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, as far as we are able, and we will do our best to do so. Q80 Mr Jenkins: It is not a trick question. I want to talk to you about a location, and leading out of something the Chairman said, if you consider a town thirty years ago had a housing stock of 10,000 council houses and 10,000 private homes; but thirty years have rolled on and due to this owner-occupier boom in Britain and the sale of council houses, the council housing stock and rented housing stock and there are 25,000 private properties, and people want to move on to the housing ladder. A town that has got 2,000 on the waiting-list for one place, but 250 on the need list, would you think that 250 people in a town of that size, 30,000, would be unreasonable if you had 250 people or couples who cannot go into private ownership groups and need social housing. Do you feel that would be an unreasonable figure? Dame Mavis McDonald: I think in the set of hypothetical circumstances you have set out it could be reasonable because you are actually dealing not with a static situation but with flows of people with different needs. Q81 Mr Jenkins: Yes, I perfectly understand the flow issue. I am telling you that at the moment there is a need for 250 units to be built now this year to accommodate that bulge. If we were to extrapolate that across the country it would work out at about a quarter of a million places that people could live in. That is our biggest problem today. Dame Mavis McDonald: But in the example you posit where some of those are for people who do not necessarily want social rented housing but want to buy in the private sector then--- Q82 Mr Jenkins: Those have already gone off. These are the ones on the council or housing authority list; these are the ones in greatest need - not want; these are in need. There is nowhere to put them at the present time. Dame Mavis McDonald: Would the local authority not be looking to both talk to its local housing associations to work out the kind of extra new provision, and would it be looking at the possibility of using the private finance initiative proposals, or indeed if it is an excellent and good authority use the new prudential borrowing arrangements, which would enable it to borrow to have new supply, and would it not be making a strong case to the regional housing board that it should have access to some of the additional funding that is available through the spending review? Q83 Mr Jenkins: It can borrow money to build then? Dame Mavis McDonald: Under the prudential borrowing requirements, you can do broader regeneration schemes which involve the provision of new, social housing to let and local authorities can do that too. Q84 Mr Jenkins: I will pass that information on. On the small number of people we have, the report cites 300,000 cases. Have you done any work to break down how many of these 300,000 cases are ordinary, young couples or single people who, given a roof over their head, can quite adequately manage their own life but they are not in a position today to launch into and buy a property? Dame Mavis McDonald: We do not collect that data at the moment in a way in which we would be able to absolutely answer and we do not ask local government to give it to us, but we are introducing some new performance indicators in April designed to get more detail of what is happening. Q85 Mr Jenkins: This is a complex report and I think the complexity of the report hides the facts. When a person turns up at a local authority, depending on where the local authority is, they are classified maybe as vulnerable and therefore get priority treatment for accommodation. The term "vulnerable" is one which I am familiar with but I cannot quantify. Dame Mavis McDonald: You can quantify it if they are accepted as intentionally homeless. Q86 Mr Jenkins: You can give me an assurance now, because you have been able to quantify this, that I can go to the south coast or Yorkshire with the same family, the same circumstances, and I will be treated exactly the same by every authority in the country? Dame Mavis McDonald: Not necessarily because it is an issue for local authority discretion. Q87 Mr Jenkins: Vulnerability is not a hard term? Dame Mavis McDonald: The Act does not talk in terms of vulnerability. The Act talks in terms of entitlement in relation to being in priority need and unintentionally homeless. It gives a wider power to local authorities in relation to others who might be vulnerable and in need of help but it does not require them to be found accommodation. That does not answer your first question to me which was: are some of these people who are turned down people who, under other circumstances, might simply have gone off and bought or rented on their own. We think quite a lot of them are but we do not collect the data in that way at the moment. Q88 Mr Jenkins: If the term "vulnerability" is flexible, how do we maintain a constant approach across all local authorities? One local authority may be collecting more names, more people on their vulnerable list. Can they get extra funds if they collect more names? Ms Alafat: Under the homelessness legislation, there are those who are vulnerable because they fall within a priority need category. The guidance that we give to local authorities has a statutory basis. Much of the way local authorities carry out their homelessness duties is challenged and has been challenged in court. The court has set precedents about the interpretation. That we know. We know the numbers, for example, that are accepted as homeless because they have a priority need, because they are pregnant or ---- Q89 Mr Jenkins: Of the 300,000, how many, if they are not in the category that can manage their own lives, are in the category of needing people's support? If they were given a place, they could rent on their own but they need additional support to allow them to be independent. Ms Alafat: We are doing two pieces of research. We did a piece of research looking at the support needs of those people that were coming in and being placed in temporary accommodation. Q90 Mr Jenkins: The numbers are? Are we talking about 10,000 out of the 300,000 or 30,000 or 250,000? Roughly how many? Mr O'Connor: We do not know the numbers who are vulnerable in the sense you are describing but there are duties on local authorities to assess their circumstances when they make an application to them as a homeless household. They must also provide them with free advice and assistance to help them overcome the problem. Q91 Mr Jenkins: Do you not fund this programme, Supporting People? Mr O'Connor: Yes. Q92 Mr Jenkins: Do you send blank cheques to local authorities or do they have to send returns back in for how many people they are assisting? Mr O'Connor: If you are asking do we know how much support is provided through the Supporting People Programme for homeless people, we know retrospectively at the end of each year how much local authorities tell us they have spent on services for clients who are labelled as homeless by the services providers, who may be at risk of homelessness or who have previously been homeless. Q93 Mr Jenkins: They give you the number of people they have assisted? Mr O'Connor: Yes. Q94 Mr Jenkins: If this honest person, who may not be able to run their own life, is placed in accommodation, becomes homeless again and goes on the merry-go-round and starts again, are they counted each time they go round the circuit? Mr O'Connor: They are. We have recently introduced data through local authority recording that identifies repeat homelessness cases. An initial estimate suggests 10% of homeless ---- Mr Jenkins: I do not have time to go on to rough sleepers or people put out from the armed forces or accommodation run by local authorities etc., but do you see this complicating the picture? We need some more guidelines and figures. There is a small number which need people support and there is a larger number of people who just need a roof over their head. Then we can say that the solution is simple: just put a roof over their head. Q95 Mr Williams: Can I take you a bit out of your area? Obviously, as a Welsh Member, I am interested in appendix b on page 68. The Welsh Assembly has set up a Homelessness Commission. How does that compare in terms of powers and range of activity with the directorate that has been set up for England? Mr O'Connor: It is different. I am not sure of the exact details of how the Commission will operate or is operating in Wales. As far as I understand it, it is an advisory commission set up to look at the issues and make recommendations to government. In a way, a similar approach we took in England was back in 2002, preparing a report called More than a Roof. Q96 Mr Williams: What would you say is the principal difference between the directorate and the Commission from your point of view? Which is more effective? Start with the difference and I will decide which is more effective on the basis of what you say. Mr O'Connor: I am afraid I do not know the terms on which the Commission has been set up or its membership in Wales. I am not able to comment in any qualified way on the difference but it sounds as if it has an external element to it. Q97 Mr Williams: Does the directorate have any directive powers that the Commission in Wales does not have? You said it is advisory. You do not describe the directorate as purely advisory, do you? Mr O'Connor: Perhaps if I describe the way the directorate works, which is what we understand most, we are responsible for funding and for providing good practice advice to local authorities. I am not sure whether the Commission in Wales is set up on a similar basis. I do not think it is. Q98 Mr Williams: Could you let us have a note on that? Dame Mavis McDonald: Certainly. Q99 Mr Williams: Looking at that same appendix, unless I have my figures wrong, in the third column, "Assessed as Homeless & in Priority Need", in England according to figure nine that has increased by 37%. According to me, the percentage increase in Wales has been 70%, nearly twice as much. That almost beggars belief when you think of the concentration in London and so on. That is a staggeringly high rate of increase compared with England, is it not? Mr O'Connor: It certainly is a higher rate of increase than has happened in England. If you look at the fourth column in that same table which compares the number per 1,000 household, that is the number of homeless accepted for every 1,000 people in the local population, Wales has gone from having a lower rate per 1,000 in England to a higher rate per 1,000 over that period. Q100 Mr Williams: In fairness to Wales, the 7.56 compares with places outside London, the immediate counties and regions. The figures seem to come in line but I am puzzled that this would appear to be almost an explosion in homelessness and in priority need. Mr O'Connor: This may, in a similar way to the recent rises in England, be connected to the extension of priority need in Wales which was changed at the same time as it was in England. Q101 Mr Williams: Could it be a definition issue? I would sooner you did not answer if you do not know. If it is a definition issue I would like to know but if you are not sure it is better you just say you do not know. Dame Mavis McDonald: The NAO report has said that when the definition of priority needs was changed the numbers went up in the same way as in England. We ought to speak to our colleagues on this. Q102 Mr Williams: Again, I would like a note on that. If you look at the lower part of that set of figures, "Temporary Accommodation", the report and your evidence have brought out the inefficiency of bed and breakfast as a means of meeting need. I do not know how much it has gone up in England over the three years covered. Do you know approximately? Mr O'Connor: Total bed and breakfast use has come down over the last year in England and, for families with children, we have ended the long term use of it. Q103 Mr Williams: It has gone up five fold in Wales in three years in the most inefficient method of provision. As compared with the fall you describe over the last year in England, the use of bed and breakfast has more than doubled in the last year. Does that suggest an inefficient use of the resources? Dame Mavis McDonald: We will have to ask our colleagues in the Welsh Assembly. Q104 Mr Williams: Is the NAO able to help us in any way? It is difficult having stuff in the report on which no one is able to answer questions. Mr Corner: We included these figures for comparative purposes and we have cleared them with the Welsh Assembly but I cannot add to anything that has been said. Q105 Mr Williams: Having the separate accounting bodies now, the NAO in Wales separately, the Scottish and the Irish, one of the great values of it is we are able to draw on best experience and learn from each other's lessons. It is helpful having comparative figures but it is not helpful if there are not comparative reasons. I am not sure where we go next on this because I am not sure who knows the answer. The homelessness and rooflessness grant, for example, in Wales: do we know how that compares with the type of grants that are available from the centre under the system in England? Mr O'Connor: I do not know in detail but it is similar in the sense that I understand it is grants to local authorities. Q106 Mr Williams: We know from whom there are grants and to whom they are paid. We do not know how the grants compare in value. Mr O'Connor: The best we can do is talk to our Welsh colleagues. Q107 Mr Williams: I do not want to embarrass you but it is helpful to me as a Welsh Member if I can use your research capability to probe the thing. I am not getting at you when I am asking questions. Dame Mavis McDonald: It would be perfectly proper for us to provide you a note with information from Welsh Assembly colleagues, drawing some of the comparators between our figures and their figures in agreement with them. The policy is for the Welsh Assembly, not for us. Q108 Mr Williams: You will provide or you in conjunction with the National Audit Office will provide? Sir John Bourn: We would be very happy to join in this. Q109 Mr Williams: I would be very happy if the National Audit Office would make some comparative studies for me as well. I was wanting to ask about the relative effectiveness of the grant, which is again something we need to look at. I can understand that is now answerable now. It is not your fault. Can we switch to something that rather surprised me earlier on the preparation of strategies? There is a table that deals with the preparation of strategies and makes the point that, in most cases, local authority social services departments - we are now back in England - did not seem to be part of the assessment work. Why is that? It would seem illogical, would it not? Dame Mavis McDonald: Our guidance said that they should be part of it. We found practice varied more widely than we would have expected. Q110 Mr Williams: It is page 62, figure 29. "Social services often did not take part in the review." Since essentially the directorate is all about joined-up, relevant and interested parties and since we have the voluntary groups and so on, why on earth are not the prime deliverers within local government, the social services departments, parties to the reviews? Ms Alafat: When we placed the requirement on local authorities to develop a homelessness strategy, it was quite clear in that that social services authorities also had a duty to cooperate with housing authorities on homelessness strategies. We did clarify that from the start. Q111 Mr Williams: They are different roles, are they not? The housing department is one provider of a facility. The identifiers of the problem, which is what we are concerned about, who should be the major participant in the decision on strategies and so on, are the people who are dealing on the ground with the problem. It seems utterly illogical for the social services department not to be at the forefront. Ms Alafat: It is the housing authority that has responsibility to produce the strategy but the social services authority was to work with them on that. Q112 Mr Williams: This is much more specific. It says, "Social services often did not take part in the review," Ms Alafat: I was clarifying that it was a requirement for local authorities. What was generally found through the evaluation of the strategies was that across the board the local authorities did involve partners. It is not that every authority did not involve social services. What the evaluation told us was that there were enough cases where social services were not fully involved to make it an area where we needed to do more work with the authorities. Q113 Mr Williams: Is this something you regard as a weakness in the current system and, if so, is it something you are addressing? How are you addressing it? Dame Mavis McDonald: I think it is fair to say that when we commissioned the strategies we were developing with local authorities the Supporting People Programme. As social service authorities have taken on board responsibility for that - of course, it is a county council responsibility in the county areas, whereas housing is a district responsibility - that has given extra impetus for the two tiers to come together. In unitary authorities, we have much more experience. Q114 Mr Williams: You are not really answering my question. I asked what are you doing to make sure that they are properly brought on board. Perhaps you would let me have a note on that matter. However, if you would go to the very bottom point in table 29, "Four out of ten authorities failed to identify the resources they need to fulfil their strategy." That does not exactly sound like serious strategy formation, does it? It could identify targets but that is not a strategy. It can identify the targets it might want to reach but it needs a strategy and to achieve its strategy it needs an assessment of resources. How can you have four out of ten councils failing to identify the resources they need? How do they know if they have too little or too much? Dame Mavis McDonald: We tried to address some of that weakness in the way in which we have given out the grant to local authorities, part of which is given on needs in relation to homelessness but part of which is given in the proposals they bring forward for specific plans to handle what they have set out as their strategic priorities and which we have set out as strategic priorities. We try to develop the focused planning through that route. When they have to revisit local authorities within the five year period we will be issuing much stronger guidelines on what is acceptable. Q115 Mr Williams: Five years is a long time, is it not? This is rather woolly. What we are getting is, frankly, almost a load of guff. If you are just talking about producing strategies without producing an assessment of the ability to provide those strategies, you might as well not talk about the strategies in the first place. Take it to the next stage. Most of the local authorities did not consider the full range of funding opportunities. That is not difficult to understand if they do not identify what they need in the first place, but why have they not found out what the full range of funding opportunities is? It seems to me that the information to build the blocks, to solve the problem, the key information, is either not being sought or it is not being provided. Dame Mavis McDonald: We have been trying to work through with local authorities, after the event, a much more efficient process of developing their knowledge of what works and what does not. We have quite a lot of evidence that, following the strategies they have, they have worked better with their other partners. They have increased the effort they put in. They have begun to define much clearer grant propositions on which they would spend the money to meet their priorities in their strategies, working with us and government officers. Mr Williams: I would like some more precise information on both those areas of questioning in relation to resource, assessment of resource and the previous issue. If I am not satisfied with the reply, if necessary, I will ask you to come back with the information. Thank you. Q116 Mr Jenkins: It would be rather remiss of me if I did not mention ex-servicemen. Almost to our national shame, ten years ago we found that 25% of rough sleepers were ex-servicemen. Is it lower now? Do you know what the percentage is? Ms Alafat: It is one of the areas where there has been a success story. Our current information tells us it is about 10% at any one time. Our work with the MoD continues and we have worked with them on providing housing advice at Catterick Barracks, for example. We are in the midst now with them of doing some research on the housing and homeless need. Q117 Mr Jenkins: At 3.11 it says a number of schemes have been funded by yourself but who owns these schemes? I wonder whether you are going to determine if they are successful in delivering. I take it you personally have a handle on these schemes and you know they are going to be delivered? We have somebody in charge of this for monitoring these initiatives? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. The figures will be collected and the next series is due next week, so we are tracking it. Q118 Mr Jenkins: We will never get it to zero obviously but we will get it to a single digit number, I take it, in the near future? Dame Mavis McDonald: Hopefully. Q119 Jon Trickett: I want to come back to this thorny subject of housing supply which I think is probably the single, critical issue here. Paragraph 1.5 says that ten years ago we were building 42,700 houses a year. I think it means in the social sector. That has fallen to 21,000 a year in 2002/3. It goes on to say that you would need to increase the number by at least 17,000 in order to meet the flow of new households. I presume that is back up to about 40,000 a year. Can you confirm that is right? Can you confirm that that means all we will be doing is adding to the number of homeless households or households in need of self-contained housing; and that to reduce the number would mean we would have to go above that 40,000 or 38,000? Dame Mavis McDonald: I do not think I have understood. Q120 Jon Trickett: The last sentence of 1.5 says you would have to increase the number of social and affordable housing by at least 17,000 a year in order to meet the flow of new, needy households. Earlier, it said that we were doing about 21,000 a year. Am I understanding this right to say that we need 40,000 additional social and affordable houses each year just to prevent the list from growing, as this sentence appears to say? Dame Mavis McDonald: This sentence says what would need to be done on top of the programmes that were in existence when Kate Barker wrote her report to meet the growing new need and not address the backlog. Q121 Jon Trickett: Can you give the Committee your estimate? That makes 38,000, 21,000 plus 17,000. That is not to tackle the backlog at all. Can you give us your estimate of the additional number of properties above 38,000 which would need to be built each year in order to begin to eat into this 400,000 backlog? Dame Mavis McDonald: No, because that is not the programme ministers have set out in ---- Q122 Jon Trickett: I have not asked you what ministers have said; I have asked you to answer a question because this Committee would like to know what it would require in order to really tackle the backlog. I am asking you as a witness to tell us how many additional houses would need to be built to tackle the backlog. Dame Mavis McDonald: At the risk of being repetitive, we do not accept that some of the figures in the Kate Barker assessment necessarily mean being met in that way but we would have to do a much more detailed survey to find out the truth of this 154,000 figure which she has put in here, using the Alan Holmans methodology, to have any real assessment of the reality of that figure. Q123 Jon Trickett: In that case, can you provide the Committee with a note as to the Department's assessment of the number of houses which would need to be built, not simply to meet the growing demand for housing but also to eat into the backlog? What is your Department's assessment of that? Dame Mavis McDonald: The Department is not currently analysing what its policies for housing supply are on that basis. Q124 Chairman: Why not? This question is absolutely key. It is the only question in a sense that matters and I am staggered that you cannot answer it. Dame Mavis McDonald: Because the proposals in the five year plan set out what the current priorities are for the next three years, which are about increasing the new supply which does get to Kate Barker's figures. Q125 Jon Trickett: I am not asking you to describe what the Department is doing. I am asking you to provide your analysis of what would be required to begin to eat into the backlog as well as to meet the increasing demand. I am not asking you to describe what the ministers are doing or what the government's programme is. What is your analysis of the additional number of new homes in the social sector which would be required, first of all, to meet the increased demand which is growing every year because of household changes and, secondly, to begin to eat into the backlog? I do not think it is a difficult question. Dame Mavis McDonald: We will give you a note on the way in which we assess housing need currently. Q126 Chairman: Why can you not answer the question now? Dame Mavis McDonald: Because I do not know whether ---- Q127 Chairman: Why do you not know? Dame Mavis McDonald: Because it has not been a priority on the part of this government or previous governments to assess that figure. This series by Alan Holmans was started in 1996. Q128 Chairman: Why not? Dame Mavis McDonald: Because it is not necessarily meaningful in terms of day to day policies and in terms of the capacity and resources available ---- Q129 Chairman: Why is it not meaningful to know the amount of accommodation you need to deal with the homelessness problem? Dame Mavis McDonald: We do know the amount of accommodation we need to deal with the homelessness problem as we define it but this figure here is not necessarily about the homelessness problem; it is about a picture of the totality of the housing market. Q130 Mr Curry: I would like to come to the rescue because I think that reply is entirely reasonable. Homelessness is a movable feast. There is nothing religious about Barker. This is not the Old Testament or the Book of Revelations. Barker was based on a series of household projections which go forward over 20 years or so. There is significant dispute about the methodology she used and about the census figures she used, which were not always the most up to date figures. There is a very big argument. This is a speculative report and it has never been anything more than a speculative report. Therefore, any government which said Barker is a religious certainty is out of its tiny mind. Dame Mavis may not agree with my assessment of Barker but it might be helpful if she said if she did or not. Dame Mavis McDonald: I agree totally with your assessment that this is an estimate based on some methodologies about which there has been a lot of debate and which is very difficult to prove one way or the other. It is not an unreasonable way of doing it, but it is not necessarily a figure on which to set the policy parameters when ministers are choosing how to spend scarce resources. Q131 Mr Curry: Have we an ethnic breakdown of homelessness? Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. Q132 Mr Curry: Does that illuminate our debate in any way? Does it give us any insight? Ms Alafat: We know it depends on where you are in the country, obviously. Not surprisingly, in areas where there is a very high BME population they also have a very high level of statistics. For example, Newham, Hackney and other areas. Across the country, we also know that BME households appear to be three times as likely to become homeless? Q133 Mr Curry: Which households? Ms Alafat: Black, minority, ethnic type households. We have also just commissioned some research by Ethnos which is providing us with a lot more information about what has been going on out there and we will be publishing that within the next few months. That provides a much more detailed picture. Q134 Mr Curry: Would you expect to draw conclusions as to the way policy is modified, adapted or progressed in the light of that? Is it an ethnic specific problem? Ms Alafat: I would not conclude that. It is more about the diversity of need and the diversity of provision and does it meet the need. What we will be publishing alongside the results of the research are good practice guidance and guidelines so that we are promoting best practice. Q135 Jon Trickett: It is easy to caricature our position and then destroy the caricature. That is what just happened. I did not ask any questions about Barker at all. We saw that Barker had come up with some predictions and they can be agreed with or disagreed with but that was not what I was asking. I was asking the Department what the Department's view was about housing supply, its projections about demographic change which will determine the number of households and therefore what its calculations were about the necessary increase in the housing supply within the social sector over the next five or six years in order to tackle both the growing homelessness problem and to eat into the backlog. At no stage, if you refer to the verbatim, did I say anything about Barker at all. Dame Mavis McDonald: In that case I misunderstood you because I thought you were asking me to take away the 400,000 figure and ---- Q136 Jon Trickett: No. I was asking for the Department's estimates of what was needed in terms of housing supply. Dame Mavis McDonald: The figures in terms of housing supply overall are also in Homes for All. There is a projection in the high demand areas of a figure of over 200,000 extra houses right across the private sector and the social rented sector and all points in between, which would bring the total new housing by 2016 in London, the south east and the eastern region up to 1.1 million. Q137 Jon Trickett: Can I ask that Dame Mavis looks at my questions in the verbatim, if it could be sent to her, so that she can try to respond to the questions I have been asking rather than the questions I have not? Dame Mavis McDonald: I apologise if that was not the answer to the question you just asked me but I genuinely believed that that was the question you just asked me. Q138 Mr Jenkins: The report says there are 100,000 households in temporary accommodation now compared with 40,000 in 1997 so we have lost 60,000. I thought Mr Trickett was asking you how you overcome that 60,000 gap that has grown and get it back to close to zero. It is as simple as that. It is not difficult. Dame Mavis McDonald: I am sorry; I am really not clear now what I am being asked. Chairman: That probably concludes our hearing. It has been a very interesting hearing. We know that there are 100,000 people in temporary accommodation and we look forward to reading your notes as to how we are going to resolve the situation. Thank you very much. |