What should a Labour government do about homelessness?

David Smith, CEO of Oasis Community Housing, shares what he would like to see a Labour government do about homelessness.

First, let me give you some good news: we can beat homelessness. Sadly, we are used to seeing people facing homelessness on our streets and hearing about the increasing numbers (currently 250,000 people) who are in temporary housing.

It’s easy to become so used to the situation that we think it can never change. But it can and it must. Homelessness should be rare, brief and not reoccur. Together, we can certainly achieve that.

The Labour Party wants to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ and ‘secure the highest growth in the G7’. To do that we need to enable everyone to achieve their potential. That can’t happen if homelessness and trauma mean that you are in a sleeping bag under a bush on a roundabout.

A recent report that we commissioned from Northumbria University found that some 94 per cent of people facing homelessness have suffered trauma. Very often, it is trauma that leads to their homeless situation, and homelessness is itself traumatic.  Yet, less than half of the people we surveyed had received the specialist help they needed to tackle that trauma. If we can tackle the trauma, we can stop the cycle of homelessness, where people find themselves back on the streets or in temporary accommodation. Without doing this, the underlying causes of a person’s homelessness are never dealt with and the cycle continues.

We should care about people facing homeless for both altruistic reasons and economic ones. Altruistically, people have inherent worth. We are all our brother’s keepers. We also care for people because what is happening to them could be happening to us. Economically, the implications of homelessness to the country are vast: one study of the homeless population of roughly 2,000 people in Newcastle and Gateshead found it cost public services a collective £132 million just to support this group for one year. Not to mention the lost economic contribution each of these people could be making that would benefit both them and our economy.

So we have both financial and moral reasons to tackle homelessness. It is, quite simply, the right thing to do.

So, what do we want to happen?  Let’s look at the big picture first, the structural causes. We need to improve the welfare system, to prevent people slipping into crisis in the first place, to provide proper funding and support for people when they’re in crisis, and to seriously up our game on building social housing by doubling it to enable them to move out of a crisis situation.

The housing crisis and homelessness are on a continuum. As you look at each part of that continuum, both the causes and the solutions are connected. It is a major crisis for our country. We should be ashamed of that, in the sixth-largest economy in the world. The focus on short-termism has, arguably, helped keep this crisis from being resolved.

A Labour government, with long-term plans, would be well-placed to tackle this.  And it needs tackling. Even before the pandemic, homelessness was through the roof, with some 300,000 people facing homelessness: 4,500 of them sleeping rough, a situation that has seen a 141 per cent increase since 2010.

But homelessness is also a very personal issue. These are all individuals with hopes and dreams, just like us. We need to understand what happened to individuals and help them face and ultimately overcome the traumas that they have experienced.

How do we do this? A Labour government could establish minimum standards for the delivery of trauma-informed homelessness support services. It could develop and roll out a national trauma-informed training programme for frontline homeless support staff.

It could ensure that local authorities only commission services that are trauma-informed, psychologically-informed and person-centred, remembering that this is about people, not an issue.

And finally, a Labour government could develop dedicated mental health pathways for people experiencing homelessness that acknowledge and reflect the challenges posed by the chaos of homelessness and its impact on trauma.

That is a long game, but if tackled nationally and locally, could mean that whenever someone becomes homeless, it isn’t for long and doesn’t reoccur. And that would give us a greater chance of breaking down barriers to opportunity and increasing our national growth. In amongst that, we could also do a powerful thing, improving individual lives. That’s something I’d vote for, wouldn’t you?

Sir Stephen Timms MP with David Smith supporting Oasis Community Housing’s ‘End Homelessness’ campaign.

David Smith is CEO of Oasis Community Housing which works in the North East of England and London.

To find out more about Oasis Community Housing’s Trauma Campaign, and to sign the pledge, go to https://www.oasiscommunityhousing.org/trauma-homelessness/