Reaction: government launches new strategy to end rough sleeping
The Government’s long-awaited new strategy on ending rough sleeping was finally published on Saturday. It has been widely trumpeted as an important step towards the Government’s commitment to bring rough sleeping to an end by 2024, and indeed it contains a number of important commitments and – critically – money, to help make this happen.
There’s a lot in there that’s positive, including a significant funding commitment (£2 billion over 3 years) and action to support single people experiencing homelessness. But when it comes to rough sleeping amongst people who are not from the UK, the strategy is somewhat underwhelming.
Let’s start with what’s good about it:
1. There’s a strong emphasis on preventing rough sleeping from happening in the first place – something obvious, but too often been neglected in the past;
2. There’s also a clear commitment to continuing to make sure non-UK nationals who can’t access public support because of their immigration status have a clear pathway off the streets. Many people who are not British citizens are denied access to the welfare state by the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) policy, which includes support designed to prevent homelessness, like Housing Benefit or Homelessness Assistance. This makes it much more likely that non-UK nationals experience homelessness and rough sleeping;
3. There’s a commitment to reform the Rough Sleeping Support Service (RSSS) and implement recommendations from a recent consultation, in particular to take it out of the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement department. As members of the Advisory Panel on the RSSS, we remain hopeful that the new service will adopt other key recommendations, such as implementing a data-sharing firewall that will stop data relating to non-UK nationals who are rough sleeping from being shared with Home Office team’s whose job it is to deport people.
But there are a number of important gaps in the strategy, which will continue to limit the Government’s ability to deliver on its manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping.
1. It fails to take sufficient account of the role of all Home Office policies in driving homelessness, effectively ignoring the areas in which action is most needed to prevent rough sleeping amongst non-UK nationals. For the non-UK national population – which made up a quarter of all rough sleepers in 2021 (and almost half in London) – action is limited to reviewing the effects of the asylum dispersal system on local authorities. The inadequacies of the asylum system do drive homelessness amongst this group, but so too do a whole host of the Government’s immigration policy choices. Yet the strategy is silent on these;
2. As a result, there’s not enough emphasis on prevention for non-UK nationals. Ensuring that all those with restricted eligibility for public funds have a clear pathway off the streets is enormously important, but this will do nothing to prevent people continuing to be forced onto the streets by an uncaring immigration system, which forces people to live precarious lives with no access to the welfare safety net;
3. The strategy draws a false and unhelpful distinction between people who are here ‘legally’ and ‘illegally’, concluding that a person here ‘illegally’ is not worthy of support.. This fails to recognise the role that the fiendishly complicated and expensive immigration system plays in pushing people out of status. As research by JCWI found in 2021, most people who don’t have regular immigration status arrived in the UK via a ‘legal’ route, but later lost their status for a range of reasons. Having no status makes it much more likely that a person will become destitute and may end up sleeping rough, without any way to access the support they need.
In short, to really make an impact on rough sleeping amongst non-UK nationals – and therefore to achieve the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto commitment of ending rough sleeping for good – we need to see:
· An acknowledgement of the role that the Government’s immigration policy choices play in driving rough sleeping, as well as other types of homelessness;
· A commitment to monitoring the impacts of all of these policies on homelessness, not just the impact of the asylum dispersal system but also examining the role of the No Recourse to Public Funds condition, and the recent introduction of new, limited forms of refugee status (Temporary Protection Status), amongst other things.
As the cost of living continues to rise, those without access to the welfare safety net remain amongst the most at risk of being pushed onto the streets. We need to see urgent action from Government for non-UK nationals at risk of homelessness, or hundreds more people will be pushed into crisis this winter.