As opera-goers trooped into the London Coliseum this week, three helpless drunks were camping on the adjacent front steps. One was struggling to stop another pulling down his trousers – or possibly helping him. In Chandos Place around the corner, half a dozen more were bedding down out of the rain. Over the road, staff at the hallowed St Martin-in-the-Fields homeless charity were under siege.
There is only one housing crisis. It is not the lack of somewhere nice to live. It is the lack of somewhere to sleep. Rough sleeping is vagrancy, and illegal in England and Wales under the Vagrancy Act. It means the police can “move you on”. The government promised to “develop a new cross-government strategy” to “put Britain back on track to ending homelessness” in its election manifesto, so next spring it is scrapping the 19th-century act. Rough sleeping will be decriminalised. Presumably that is considered a problem solved.
Homelessness is soaring. This week, a study from Crisis showed the figure had risen in England by 21% between 2022 and 2024, and by 45% since 2012. It has now reached 300,000 households. The figures for London are the most startling, with street sleeping in Westminster rising by a quarter in the past year alone. A corresponding increase in begging is equally noticeable, outside shops and tube stations and near cashpoints.
Only when the figures are broken down into individuals do we realise how diverse is this predicament. Homelessness is not the result of only alcohol and drug addiction – whatever their causes may be – but often of the rough edges, the missteps of the welfare state. Loss of a home can result from prison release, a ban on migrant working, a refusal of A&E treatment, a rejected asylum claim or marriage failure. Much of the recent increase has been due to the chaos in the courts and parole, and the immigration surge.
When the writer Christina Lamb spent the pandemic in a Shrewsbury hotel, she used it to study the town’s 33 rough sleepers. Her report of their cases was gripping. They were not a homeless lump. Each story was an individual tragedy, and almost all seemed susceptible to solution, if only they could be handled with care and attention. That did happen, and a remarkable number did not return to the streets.
The welfare state did once care. The Clays Lane housing cooperative in east London’s Stratford was an experimental community of vulnerable East Enders, later run by the Peabody Trust. It had its problems, but it was trying and often succeeding to rescue damaged lives. In 2007, the then government quietly flattened it to make way for its beloved Olympic village. Four hundred and fifty mostly men were evicted and scattered to the winds, their homes replaced by the present “luxury living” East Village.
Today, the government claims to spend £844m a year on emergency B&Bs and hostels in England. But Keir Starmer’s threatened draconian taxation and regulation of private landlords is clearly designed to slash the accommodation most relevant to homeless people. That is, the bottom end of the private rented sector.
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The reality is that British housing policy has long been more concerned with the floating voter than the poor. Relentless subsidies to first-time buyers pushed up house prices, while Starmer’s fixation with 1.5m newbuild homes is getting nowhere. The government has eased planning controls to pander to the construction lobby’s desire for executive homes on rural sites. The policy is counterproductive. It appears that developers have used Starmer’s bullying of local planners to increase their land banks, but have no interest in building houses on them. The reason is that this would lead to a house price fall. As a result, housebuilding since the election has plummeted. Figures show starts in the past year down an astonishing 55%, with research by the property services company CBRE recording two-thirds of London boroughs with no starts at all. Does Starmer have no advisers who understand economics?
The government’s fixation with new buildings and new towns ignores the estimated 1m existing premises now standing empty in old towns in England, a number rising each year. Its eagerness to deregulate rural construction also ignores what should be the priority of dealing with town sites and the communities dependent on them. As for Starmer’s obsession with new towns, they are the archaic vanity projects of statist leaders worldwide. They eat infrastructure, emit carbon and ignore the reuse of existing buildings. They certainly have nothing to do with urban homeless people.
Homelessness is unlike a failing NHS, failing prisons and a failing benefits system. These are hidden from most of us. Homelessness is a failure we can see every day.
