One in 53 people in London is homeless right now. What happened?
And can it be fixed?
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In May of last year we wrote about how 2021 was shaping up to be London’s worst ever year for homelessness. At the time there were around 3,600 people sleeping rough in London, 60,680 households in emergency accommodation, and 165,000 people living in “borough-provided temporary accommodation”.
The prediction was that there was a “a summer wave of homelessness” on the horizon which would lead to the “highest ever levels by Christmas.”
So, what happened next?
The CHAIN (Combined Homelessness and Information Network) data for July to September of last year showed that the number of people recorded sleeping rough went down slightly to 2,918, then at the end of the year the Government released data showing that “in the last year the number of rough sleepers in London has fallen by 37 percent”.
The Mayor also released some numbers which said that 2,500 rough sleepers had been accommodated in GLA-provided accommodation as part of the ‘Everyone In’ programme and that “86 per cent of those who passed through these hotels did not return to the streets.”
That’s the ‘glass half full’ view of what’s going on. But if you dig a bit deeper things start looking a little less rosy.
The bad news is that the number of people ‘without a permanent home’ is now closer to 170,000 and that number includes 86,000 children. That effectively means that one in every 53 people living in London is currently without a home. Those numbers come from Shelter which also reported that there are around 700 people living on the street in London every night.
According to analysis from the charity Single Homeless Project (who take Statutory Homeless data from local authorities and combine it with the CHAIN figures), one Londoner is now forced into homelessness every 11 minutes and someone is made ‘street homeless’ every 90 minutes.
Why is this happening?
In its report, the Single Homeless Project lays the blame squarely at the door of council incentive schemes that pay landlords “millions of pounds in financial incentives”.
Basically, as demand for rented accommodation in London goes up, rental prices go up as well. Add to that the lack of affordable housing (a problem which has been made worse by the pandemic), and it means that councils have to pay more and more money to landlords to ‘incentivise’ them to accept homeless tenants. Somewhat predictably, those landlords then “either issue short term tenancies or end longer-term ones early” so they can claim the next wad of cash for the next tenant.
That’s reason one. Reason two is that, despite the Government saying that the ‘Everyone In’ scheme was “ongoing” through last year, there was a lot of evidence that councils weren’t giving the same level of support to rough sleepers as they had done during the first lockdown, and now the scheme has been almost entirely wound down. As Jasmine Basran, policy manager for Crisis, told the FT last month, ‘Everyone In’ “wasn’t a policy or law. A lot of it was goodwill and initiative.”
Combine all that with the furlough scheme ending, Universal Credit being cut, the rise in energy prices, and falling temperatures and you have a pretty nasty ‘perfect storm’.
What happens now?
A few weeks ago the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities announced a nationwide £316m Homelessness Prevention Grant, which they say will allow councils to help people “find a new home, access support for unexpected evictions and secure temporary accommodation where needed.” That comes on the back of £66 million of funding to “provide safe and warm accommodation over winter”.
Despite all that, last week Sadiq Khan was still forced to activate the pan-London Severe Weather Emergency Protocols (SWEP) which is designed to make emergency accommodation available for people who are sleeping rough “during weather conditions that could pose a threat to life”.
And in the same week the Independent reported that some homeless people were being “told to sleep on streets first” if they wanted access to emergency accommodation, with one London man being turned away for accommodation “because he had been sleeping on night buses and at Heathrow airport as well as wandering the streets.”
There’s some serious systemic problems here that aren’t going to be solved by continually introducing ‘emergency measures’ that get wound down after a few months, but the one light at the end of the tunnel is a policy called ‘Housing First’.
Instead of making rough sleepers “jump through hoops to prove their ability to hold down a home in order to access accommodation”, the Housing First police just gives them a home and follows that up with “wraparound support” to help them keep their home as well as “battle their demons and adapt to independent living so they can get back on their feet.”
In 2018 a Housing First pilot was introduced in this country, but the funding for those pilots is due to end in March and so far there’s been no signs from the government of any additional money. Unfortunately, all those people waiting for a positive sign from the Prime Minister are carrying the not-too-distant memory of the pledge he made when he was mayor of London to “end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012”.
By the time Boris Johnson left that office of course, the number of people on the street had more than doubled.
Finally, a bit of good news
In the week that reality TV runner-up and sweatshop shill, Molly Mae Hague doled out some unwanted advice on hard work and privilege, it’s worth reading this Big Issue interview with Philip Waltham, an ex-drug addict who used to sell the Big Issue on the streets of Clerkenwell and Hampstead and who now “runs one of Britain’s biggest sustainable fashion wholesalers”.
News Bits
BBC London reports that the government has spent “£80,000 every four weeks since August on an unused Uber Boat ferry service”. Uber was supposed to be running a temporary ferry service for people unable to cross Hammersmith Bridge from February of last year, but the service was delayed until August due to “additional time” being needed… and then the bridge reopened in July. Despite that, a ferry service still operated “on a standby basis” and the “small core team” running it cost £80k a month.
There’s a new tube map in town. The biggest change is of course the temporary absence of the Northern Line’s Bank branch, and there’s also “a new black line that connects Oval to Kennington station on the Charing Cross side of the Northern line.”
According to some new data the Met has found more than 1,000 cannabis farms in the last six years. Nearly half of them were discovered during lockdown. Yesterday it was reported that, on New Year’s Eve, a man died in a fire in a cannabis factory in Clapton.
Stompie the tank has been removed from its home near the Old Kent Road. There’s long been rumours that the Soviet war machine was part of some council land dispute so there were fears Stompie had been evicted, but it looks like it’s just taken a bit of time for some “restoration”.
An entire herd of life-sized bronze lions have appeared on the Waterloo Millennium Green. The display of 20 sculptures is designed to raise awareness of the dangers lions face both in the wild and in captivity. They also seem designed to scare the crap out of anyone walking through the park at night, after a few drinks.
Some ‘wag’ has stared a petition to save the Marble Arch Mound.
