Consultation Response – London Housing Strategy
Housing Justice welcomes the opportunity to take part in this consultation. We are delighted that the Mayor continues to be committed to ending rough sleeping in London. However, we continue to be concerned that attention to the target of ending rough sleeping by 2012 will skew activity and resources away from the need to improve homelessness prevention services and emergency accommodation provision, both of which we consider to be vital in stemming the flow of new (and returning) people on to the street. Our work across the country supports our view that this is a national problem whose symptoms erupt in London: people continue to run to London from situations of homelessness and other life crises which have arisen elsewhere in the UK. We cannot end homelessness in London without substantially ending homelessness in the UK. To this end we would support the Mayor in seeking increased resources from the Government to tackle national homelessness manifesting in London.
We have elected not to comment in detail on every recommendation but rather to select particular issues where we feel the voice of churches, church-linked projects and of our homeless guests have something particular to contribute.
1.1 Rethinking London’s Housing
1.1.3 Creating mixed communities and 1.1H develop proposals to improve tenure mix in neighbourhoods dominated by a single tenure
Housing Justice believes this should include the building or creation of social rented and intermediate homes on brown field sites in area where the dominant tenure is owner occupation. Sites would include redundant churches and other church owned property as advocated by our recently published toolkit: Faith in Affordable Housing, downloadable from www.fiah.org.uk. There is also the possibility of providing good quality temporary housing using containers which could be located above church car parks (see www.containercity.com) and forms of community self-help housing (see www.self-help-housing.org). Housing Justice is keen to work with the Mayor, HCA and London Boroughs to facilitate these sort of developments in partnership with London’s Christian community.
1.3 Improving the social rented sector
Housing Justice is concerned that there is no mention of the needs of single people and childless couples in this section of the strategy. We believe that people who fall outside the priority need status for the homelessness duty under the 2003 Act and who have low support needs are a vulnerable group. Better access to social renting for this group will have the effect of reducing the flow of people on to the street.
1.4 Improving the private rented sector
1.4.1 Providing more private rented homes
We recommend the provision of workers hostels along similar lines to commercial student accommodation as part of the expansion of the private rented sector. We believe that properties built as buy to let investment opportunities which are of inferior quality to social rented sector standards may be suitable for conversion to workers hostels.
We understand that one of the barriers to increasing institutional investment is the small size of schemes available. We suggest that the Mayor works with the HCA and London Boroughs to create London-wide schemes of sufficient size to interest investors.
2.1 Designing better homes
2.1D make designing out crime a key priority for planning and housing investment decisions
While we welcome developments in urban design which reduce the incidence of crime we are concerned that this is sometimes accompanied by the privatisation of public space. We believe that multi-use public spaces, planned with the participation of, and actively cared for by, a representative group of the local community is the best solution. We would oppose the further privatisation of public space in areas with low residential occupation and we would like to be reassured that this will not be part of the planning priority.
2.2.3c Back gardens will be protected as far as strategically possible from new housing development, subject to any permitted development rights
We would like to see this protection extended to include churchyards and park/garden open spaces within housing estates.
2.3 Revitalising homes and communities
We are very encouraged by the actions in this section and we believe that churches have a part to play in the regeneration of their communities. As we said above, Housing Justice is keen to work with the Mayor, HCA and London Boroughs to facilitate the use of redundant churches, church land and community self-help housing projects for regeneration in partnership with London’s Christian community.
3.2 Delivering locally
3.2.1b Rough sleeping should be ended by 2012…
3.2A ensure the development, implementation and monitoring of a strategic action plan to end rough sleeping, through the new London Delivery Board of the government, the boroughs and the voluntary sector, led by the Mayor
We were disappointed that the London Delivery Board and action to end rough sleeping did not feature in the Executive Summary of the Draft Strategy, apart from Section 3.2A (above). We continue to believe that the Delivery Board and the Mayor are missing a trick by not having adequate representation of the faith element of the voluntary sector on the Delivery Board. Faith communities, and especially Christian churches (of all denominations) play an important role in providing formal and informal services for homeless people. The informal services provided by this group, of which Housing Justice is a representative body because of our membership and our work with Winter Shelters and Soup Runs, are often the only safety net for people with low support needs, people for whom there is no statutory duty, people with no local connection in the area where they are presenting as homeless and people with no recourse to public funds. The faith groups working with homeless people are a grass roots community response which could be built on and which could, with the right kind of collaborative involvement, play an effective part in further reducing rough sleeping and meeting the 2012 target. In addition to our work with shelters and soup runs we are also about to begin a pilot mentoring and befriending project in London, funded by CLG, which is aimed at harnessing community based volunteer support to help people move off the street and to maintain them in homes when newly housed. We would like to be doing this in closer partnership with the Mayor and the London Delivery Board partners.
However, we share the concerns of other groups, for example the Simon Community and the Salvation Army, that the 2012 target is motivated more by the appearance of London to visitors from abroad during the Olympics than by concern for rough sleepers. Thus we are afraid that there will be pressure on statutorily funded services to use unethical tactics in order to ‘encourage’ rough sleepers to move indoors. We accept that a degree of assertiveness is required to persuade some people that they will be better off in accommodation but we believe that some of the methods recently used in the City of London (“Operation Poncho”) have verged on the unlawful use of force, which we think is unacceptable.
Another point to be made under this heading is the pressing need for a better funded and more systematic approach to meeting the needs of migrant workers from the EU. DWP Job Centres must be required to play a more active role in assisting people whose main purpose in coming to the UK is employment. People for whom this is not a realistic possibility, such as those suffering from alcoholism or other health related problems, need something like the package of care and on-going support offered by Barka. Barka has a good track record of working in partnership with services and local authorities in the UK to help entrenched and destitute homeless EU citizens to regain their place in society.
We welcome the emphasis on cross borough working and on the development of flexible paths out of homelessness such as work first and direct access to housing from the street. We look forward to developing better relationships between winter shelters and boroughs so that the shelters can become more effective routes back into mainstream society.
Housing Justice
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