by George O’Neill, Chief Executive, Cardinal Hume Centre
It would be easy to feel quite heady. We now have a Prime Minister who is not only committed to restoring hope to UK politics, but also to, ‘putting care into everything he does’. His first intervention to prove his point is a restoration of the ambition to end rough sleeping. It is, he says, ‘about putting the right values, the right standards at the heart of government’.
It is perhaps the first sign of the influence Catholic social teaching has had on our new Prime Minister, and it is an ambition rightly celebrated by housing campaigners. But look a little more closely at Manchester, where he set a similar local ambition, and you will see the number of people sleeping rough from a low in 2021 has begun to steadily creep up.
That does not mean those efforts were wasted; quite the opposite. Rough sleeping figures would have been far worse without the combined efforts of government, the voluntary sector and local businesses. But it is a reminder that promises are sometimes easier to make than to keep, particularly when success depends on far more than rough sleeping services alone.
Rough sleeping is the most visible form of homelessness. It is also one of the clearest signs that so many of the country’s systems are stretched, allowing people to fall through the gaps between siloed support. The same broken system is evident in the less visible forms of homelessness we see at the Cardinal Hume Centre. Like the teenager who came to us after escaping domestic violence at home, the pregnant mum sleeping on the tube and friends’ sofas, or the school child leaving the classroom to meet her parents at a train station to find out which hotel they will sleep in that night.
In just three years, the number of households experiencing homelessness in London has increased by around a third. In England, over 85,000 families and more than 170,000 children – a record number of under-18s – live in temporary accommodation. Even in Westminster, Burnham’s new home, with all its wealth there are nearly 4,000 homeless children living in often crowded, unsuitable and unsafe temporary accommodation – far more than the number counted on the borough’s streets.
The sad fact is that these experiences risk shaping a lifetime. They affect health, wellbeing and educational outcomes. Homelessness is, as the government has previously recognised, one of the deepest forms of poverty. At its most acute, it can lead to a lifetime of engagement with social care or, worse, the criminal justice system. Most tragically, these children are among those at greatest risk of experiencing homelessness again as adults. Experience poverty or trauma as a child and you are far more likely to experience homelessness later in life. In one study of homeless adults with complex needs, 85% had experienced childhood trauma, 40% had run away from home at some point, and nearly a third had left home before the age of 18.
That points to a simple truth: you cannot tackle homelessness by addressing only its most acute and visible symptom. Rough sleeping has increased at the same time as our youth, health and criminal justice systems have each faced their own crises. As housing costs have risen and the supply of homes has fallen, more people have lost not just a home, but stability and safety.
If you want to tackle one form of homelessness, you have to tackle them all. Now, as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has a real opportunity to look at the whole system rather than selected parts. If he is looking for a circuit breaker on homelessness and rough sleeping, he should start here.
It should mean matching diligence on the systemic causes of homelessness with equal diligence for the people caught in the grip of that broken system.
So yes, tackle the lack of housing, a welfare system that still puts barriers in the way of work, and a creaking health service. But match that with accessible support for families and children who too often fall through the gaps between siloed services. Break the silos that ask people to divide their lives into separate problems: housing here, money there, education somewhere else. The wellbeing of their child left in an entirely different queue.
People’s lives do not work like that, and neither should the support they receive. Yes, we need the much-heralded increase in the construction of affordable homes, but we also need a little of that promised care. Get that right and you won’t only significantly increase your chances of keeping your promise on rough sleeping, you will also change the trajectory of thousands of lives.