UK Homeless People Face More Evictions as Complaints Increase

More Evictions

A newspaper investigation has revealed that UK tent encampment evictions have grown by 352 percent in the last five years. This begs the question: what is the UK going to do about homelessness?

A Typical Local Newspaper Report

On the 14th June, the Worcester News reported, “A HOMELESS camp where dwellers allegedly drink, take drugs and light fires has been labelled an “eye sore” by nearby homeowners who also claim passers-by are verbally abused.” Local residents are demanding the camp be evicted.

This is not an unusual story as those in comfort demand those lacking very basic human needs are moved on. Naturally these people will move, but only to another location until they are moved again.

Guardian Investigation

The Guardian newspaper reported the outcome of its investigation: where there were 72 camp evictions across the UK in 2014, the numbers hit 254 in 2018. There are 352 local authorities nationally, so 2/3rds of those may have evicted at least one encampment in 2018.

Not all complaints by residents lead to evictions. The same Guardian story reported, “Separate figures obtained by the Guardian show complaints to councils about homeless encampments have shot up 448% in five years, from 277 in 2014 to 1,241 in 2018, rising year on year, with big increases in 2016 and 2017.”

The Homelessness Reduction Act

The government passed the Homelessness Reduction Act in 2018. My home council and housing authority published a report on homelessness in May 2018. It explained the new Act: It “places new legal duties on English councils to intervene at an earlier stage to prevent homelessness, and to provide intensive, personalised and meaningful help to people to access appropriate housing, irrespective of local connection, intentionality or priority need.”

There are still more holes in the responsibilities bestowed upon councils than a ripped fishing net! These inclusions to a local housing authority being forced to re-home someone include:

  • Where they are eligible for support (essentially, this means having an indefinite right to remain in the UK)
  • Are unintentionally homeless
  • Have a local connection to the area in which they are applying
  • Are from a specified ‘priority need’ group

You can be “intentionally homeless” if you have fallen into rent arrears. With rental prices rocketing and welfare payment rates stagnating, that’s not exactly a deliberate act in many cases!

Refusing Accommodation

It isn’t just people being refused/evicted from accommodation that leads to such encampments.

A Northampton Church of England vicar was done over by a national tabloid newspaper for evicting one such encampment on his church land. Fifty-two-year-old Paul was in the camp and was interviewed for the Guardian investigation this article focused on. He said, “We have a lot of social problems and addictions. We just want to get out of reality and get high or drunk. Anything to help us through the day … There are too many rules in shelters, and they threaten you with eviction. So, I may as well be in a tent and make my own rules.”

The Dorset Council report references this idea that homeless people find the strictures put upon them for receiving housing support are too tight. The Dorset Housing Intensive Support Service (DHISS) “policy toward keeping people housed support was focused on avoiding or repaying arrears, producing a conflict in the provision of support, with staff having a policing role as well as a support role.

This created a disincentive for vulnerable people to seek help from support staff, out of fear of losing their accommodation – which in turn often led to an increase in unhealthy “coping” mechanisms such as offending and alcohol/drug abuse.” Essentially, in creating a climate of fear among those at housing risk, so clients of the service fell backwards. Back to the tents!

Housing First

The Dorset Housing Intensive Support Service (DHISS) was a network of large hostels where residents were firstly housed and then their complex needs addressed. This is a model similar to Finland. However, the report argued, “The accommodation-based support model was widely perceived to be both expensive and ineffective, with the commissioned provider acting as both landlord and support service.” Reading into this, I would suggest that while more expensive to commission, the model needs to be tweaked. A separately commissioned support team would work into the hostel so those affected get unquestioning support from one team and advice on rent arrears from the landlord.

In an opinion piece in the Guardian a few days after the tent camp eviction investigation, the writer suggested the UK has two ways to go in dealing with tent encampments. Firstly, the US model where a local authority effectively permits an encampment, or the Finnish model where housing is treated as a fundamental human right.

Harry Quilter-Pinner, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research wrote, “A far more satisfying solution can be found in Finland, where homelessness has dropped precipitously over the past decade, even as it has risen in other parts of the world. Their answer is painfully simple: give homes to homeless people. This makes housing a human right rather than a luxury and puts problems like mental health and addiction – often a barrier to accessing stable accommodation in the UK – to one side.” The country has a population 1/12th of the UK yet simultaneously builds far more social housing than the UK.

A Fundamental Human Right

In treating having a home as a fundamental human right, those adrift in life would find a safe harbour and the authorities would do everything in their power to keep them in accommodation. The Dorset report again shows the complex needs that people face in order to end up on the street. “People experiencing, or threatened with, ‘street’ homelessness commonly face ‘multiple exclusions’ that include some combination of:

  • substance misuse issues;
  • poor mental health;
  • institutional experiences (e.g. prison and the care system);
  • ‘street culture’ activities (e.g. street drinking; begging; anti-social behaviour);
  • fleeing domestic abuse.

These aren’t cheaply fixed. The people with these needs need far more investment than someone at risk of homelessness.

Cheaper to Prevent Than to Cure?

The theory behind the Homeless Reduction Act 2018 is sound. It recognises it is cheaper and more effective to prevent homelessness than to fix it after the event. In its allowing too many exclusions to a local authority with the responsibility to rehouse someone, it falls hard. There is no cheap fix to the national housing problem though. Billions of pounds need to be invested in social housing.

The current housebuilding policy allows the “market” to fix the housing problem. This allows developers to build executive homes by the thousand and social housing in single digits within these middle-class ghettos.

Courts have even permitted developers to pay a sum to councils instead of building social housing. These sums are often far less than the cost of building each home.

In letting “the market” fix the problem, only wealthy people are housed – not the millions in poor housing. This needs to be fixed at the root. If housing was a fundamental right then tents wouldn’t bother the middle classes in their ghettos of comfort!


Richard Shrubb

Richard Shrubb

  

With a background as a mental health service user, Richard has been a leading UK social affairs writer in the past. He now focuses this energy in social justice in the most economically deprived town of the UK, Weymouth in Dorset while looking after his wife, daughter and three cats in nearby Prince Charles' housing estate of Poundbury.

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