I was kinda-sorta aware that many homeless people aren't just lying on the streets begging, they actually work, but I didn't realise how big the scale of it was until recently.
Homelessness is increasing
A wonderful piece by @HadleyFreeman for @guardian featuring SFTS. “My walk to work shows me how homelessness is transforming Britain” https://t.co/xthQNCmpLW— ShelterFromTheStorm (@SFTSLondon) January 12, 2019
The reason why there's little in the way of outrage is because, as a society, we don't give a damn. It's true. Big news: Brexit being bodged — heated protests outside Parliament. Meanwhile, homeless people are dying in the streets to little in the way of fanfare. The Guardian's not wrong: I'm seeing more and more young women on the streets of Manchester while more and more buildings shoot up around me. Are any of these going to be given to the homeless or to people on low incomes? Ha ha ha! No. Don't kid yourselves. Yet homelessness is increasing. Why?
Government policy
The government, at a local and national level, is partly to blame for the lack of accommodation options. It's the government's job to allocate land resources and to manage planning. It has sold off social housing, refused to build social housing or fund social housing projects, or to tackle the inequalities that make housing unaffordable for so many of us. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham had this to say:
“Many local councils across Greater Manchester will likely be cutting £7m or more worth of services from their budgets this year. In Salford we have lost £186m from our budget since 2010, with a further £11.2m to cut this year with more government cuts to local council budgets planned for future years.
“The current epidemic of homelessness and rough sleeping across Britain has been created by a precarious labour market and vicious cuts to benefits payments in the middle of an economic crisis - when people are already struggling to make-ends-meet.
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"Austerity and government cuts to local councils has further entrenched the problem, which has also been exacerbated by the failure of planning and housing policy to build truly affordable homes.
- What is being done to help the homeless in Greater Manchester? by Jennifer Williams for the Manchester Evening News
It doesn't help that landlording is not the cash cow many people think it would be.
Low wage growth
A BBC report from October last year declared:
Pay rose by 3.1% in the three months to August, compared with a year ago, while inflation for the same period was 2.5%.
Last week, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane said he saw signs of a "new dawn" for wage growth.
The latest official data also showed unemployment fell by 47,000 to 1.36 million in the three months to August. The jobless rate remained at 4%.
Woo hoo, right? Yay? Trumpets and ticker tape? Wages excluding bonuses have risen at their fastest pace in nearly 10 years! Don't get too excited.
The fact that 3.1% is the biggest pay rise since February 2009 says more about how weak pay growth has been in the last decade than how strong it has been in the past year. Strip out the effect of inflation (as measured by the Consumer Prices Index) and you get pay growth of just 0.6%.
Then look back at the last decade, the worst decade for living standards in 200 years. If you're a half-full person, well we're up by about £25 per week on average since the squeeze on living standards was at its tightest back in 2014.
But if you're half-empty, we're still earning about £20 a week less than we did 10 years ago when the global financial crisis struck.
Suren Thiru, head of economics at the BCC, said: "While wage growth increased again, the pace at which pay growth is exceeding price growth remains well below the historic average, meaning the current squeeze on spending power is unlikely to ease.
"Achieving a meaningful improvement in wage growth will be an uphill struggle unless the underlying issues that continue to limit pay settlements are tackled - notably sluggish productivity, considerable underemployment and high upfront costs for businesses."- UK wage growth fastest for nearly 10 years by BBC News
Of course, these are average figures, they don't apply across the board. So basically you may not be massively surprised by the news that wage growth has not kept pace with the cost of living. When you don't earn enough to save and you're one pay packet away from being homeless it shouldn't surprise you to learn that there's such a thing as the working homeless.
Working households were typically turning to their council for help after losing a tenancy and finding themselves priced out of their local area by soaring rents.
The loss of a private-sector tenancy is the biggest single cause of homelessness in England, according to Shelter, accounting for more than a quarter of all homelessness acceptances.
The shortage of suitable affordable homes meant homeless households were often placed in cheap hotels, hostels, or large houses with a family in each bedroom, Shelter said. - Shelter warns of leap in working homeless as families struggle by Patrick Butler for The Guardian
What is being done about it?
The Government have been making positive noises about dealing with homelessness but honestly, they've done sod all.
Funding
When Theresa May unveiled a funding package for Brexit-voting towns it seemed that the Government had finally woken up. Three things to note:
- The money is for Brexit-voting towns
- It's nowhere near enough to cover the costs of service provision there
- No 10 said communities would be given some say about how to spend the money in their towns via local enterprise partnerships.
Homelessness projects
A scheme launched last year to great fanfare was supposed to tackle rough sleeping.
The new £100m strategy will take a three-pronged approach, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said, including prevention, intervention and recovery.
Up to £30m of the fund will go towards mental health treatment and provide training for frontline staff to help those under the influence of the synthetic cannabinoid spice.
A further £50m will be set aside to fund homes outside of London for people ready to move on from hostels and those seeking refuge from domestic abuse.
Ministers will also pilot accommodation that is tailored for individuals leaving prison in an effort to avoid them ending up on the streets.
And research is also expected to probe the nature and scale of LGBT+ homelessness to determine measures. The Albert Kennedy Trust charity claims that LGBT+ young people comprise up to 24 per cent of the youth homelessness population as they are more likely to experience family rejection, abuse and violence. - Theresa May unveils £100m government fund to eradicate rough sleeping in England within a decade by Ashley Cowburn for the Independent
All this lovely lolly's got to last till 2027 so don't spend it all at once.
What can we do?
First of all we have to accept that we've always had, and there may always be homelessness. This is due to complex factors including unemployment or low wages. Basically, whenever available people have outstripped available housing, we have homeless people. Therefore, a multifaceted plan needs to be developed to include affordable housing for all. Bear in mind that what the Government calls affordable and what we can afford are different things.
Secondly, we must accept that doing nothing costs more than doing something.
Research shows that effective early interventions reduce the personal and financial cost of homelessness.
If 40,000 people were prevented from becoming homeless for one year in England it would save the public purse £370 million. In 2012 the cost of homelessness in England was reported as being up to £1 billion (gross) a year.
If housing homeless costs less than doing nothing, then surely to goodness a housing first policy is a winner.
That’s where Housing First comes in, a project launched two years ago that has its roots in the US but is currently operating as a £28 million combined authority pilot scheme in Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City region and the West Midlands. Rather than spending vast sums preparing people for running their own homes, the scheme seeks to house people immediately and then supports them in taking responsibility for whatever their needs might be, whether medical, social or financial. If you have your own front door, it gives you the stability to progress and helps build self-esteem. This might sound dangerously optimistic but it has achieved positive results in a number of countries, both big and small.And so it should, because according to PwC, rolling out Housing First over the next decade would cost £9.9 billion but would deliver benefits worth £26.4 billion in terms of reducing costs to the NHS, the prison service, local authorities and, ultimately, would lead to an increase in tax contributions. That means that for every £1 invested, an estimated benefit of £2.70 would be generated. - Homelessness isn’t a government priority. It should be, by Mark Palmer for The Spectator
Methinks the author of the above post assumes the newly housed would immediately seek remunerative work but if the worker earns less than it costs to house him or her, the benefits would be reduced. As I wrote earlier, the approach should be multifaceted.
This can be done. It should be for both fiscal and moral reasons, but with ideology's finger in the pie, the question is, will it? Honestly, I'm not holding my breath.
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