Homelessness and Rough Sleeping

Steve Baker Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

It is a thorough and utter disgrace that anyone should be homeless in the 21st century in our country. It makes me wonder whether the welfare state safety net has any meaning whatever when people are out there, dying on our streets—and I do mean dying on our streets, because on Christmas day in 2006, Josie Razzell died in the stairwell of Easton Street car park in High Wycombe. She died of exposure. As a result, the churches in High Wycombe came together in a story similar to that told by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders). They were determined to ensure that never again would anyone die of exposure on our streets.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) mentioned the severe weather emergency protocol. The fact is that that protocol is a last resort and it simply is not good enough. Were it not for Wycombe Homeless Connection, my goodness—the number of people who would suffer in Wycombe. Were it not for the YMCA, what a state we would be in.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), who opened the debate, mentioned one particular cause and one particular story and made the case very movingly, but if only that man had not treated his partner violently, that problem perhaps would not have arisen. I think that every hon. Member present knows that the causes of homelessness are complex and wide ranging. They include addictions, debt, worklessness and educational failure and, of course, are compounded in a dreadful cycle of health problems, both physical and mental. Those of us who have worked in night shelters for a number of years will have seen, I suspect, altogether too much suffering in that regard.

It is not enough to talk only about the suffering that has happened recently. It is the case that the numbers have increased, but we heard earlier that some of the efforts at non-state provision go back as far as 1989—I think that that is what my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay said—and of course the problem extends far before that. Opposition Members talked about the housing market and the shortage of supply. The housing market is characterised by state land-use planning and state intervention in the credit markets. If there is too little housing, it can only be the case that the state has made a mess of it.

When I look at all these stories, I see a number of things: the failure of individuals to live in the right relationship with one another, the failure of a man to look after his partner and the failures of people to get a good education, get a job and build up their lives. What I want to see is the shortest possible route to minimising this human suffering, but what I see at the moment is a constant recourse to state action at a time when the quality and quantity of welfare, health and education produced by the state simply is not good enough and we also, very clearly, cannot afford it, because we have resorted to quantitative easing to suppress interest rates just to keep up the borrowing necessary to sustain this level of failure.

Therefore, what I have to say to my hon. Friend the Minister is twofold. First, what is he doing to end the complex cycles of state failure that are ruining people’s lives? Secondly, will he please take every possible—every conceivable—step that he can to remove the obstacles that the state places in people’s way, preventing them from just getting out there and helping people across the wide range of complex causes of chronic and abject poverty.

[Mark Field]

My hon. Friend will realise that I very much agree with what he has to say on the macro-economic side about the very insidious—dangerous—long-term effects on the British economy of quantitative easing. Will he accept that part of the difficulty with housing law, which goes back almost 100 years—the first rent Acts came in at the end of the first world war—is that, every time, we try to add another elastoplast to the system when there needs to be a much more imaginative approach by politicians, academics and the like to looking at the way in which our housing market operates? All too often, we have seen short-term problems, which we have tried to solve with new legislation, rather than recognising, as my hon. Friend rightly said, that it has been state action and legislation in the past that has helped to produce all the absurdities and anomalies currently seen in our private rented sector.

[Steve Baker]

I agree, but it is not enough for us just to look at increasing supply. We should be looking at those factors that increase demand, such as the tragedy of family breakdown, which perhaps I will go into in more detail in the debate in the main Chamber later on hunger.

I want to finish with this thought. We are coming up to Christmas—the anniversary of the death of Josie Razzell in High Wycombe. But Christmas is a time of celebration, because it is a time when we realise that the process of God offering to mankind salvation from all these difficulties began with an event that we celebrate at Christmas. We are not here to preach the gospel, but I have to say that these problems and cycles will continue for ever unless people start to learn that they must love their neighbour and, first and foremost, love their God.