In the coming months, the Centre for Social Justice will explore how the Government can extend its 'social reform' agenda to tackle homelessness.
With an estimated 3,500 people sleeping rough on any one night we need a bold, new approach to housing to bring this figure down.
In our recently published report, Home Improvements we set out one part of the solution by calling on the Government to incentivise the expansion of Social Lettings Agencies with services to help rough sleepers. This follows a CSJ survey of private landlords where 82 per cent said they would be unwilling to let their property to a homeless person. For most homeless people, many potentially affordable homes are simply unavailable.
A national strategy for Social Lettings Agencies simply will not be enough on its own. As Iain Duncan Smith outlined in his speech to the CSJ last week, welfare systems need to be more ‘human’ in order to tackle big social issues over the long term. The system should adapt to those most in need, not the other way round.
Where a rough sleeper has no family to support them, suffers from a severe mental illness or faces crippling addiction problems, an affordable available home is simply not enough on its own. If we want to turn lives around and reduce the number of people living rough on our streets we will need to tackle these ‘human’ issues.
Answering these and other tough questions will be the focus of CSJ work on Homelessness over the coming months.
Homelessness Statistics:
3,569 people were counted as rough sleepers on one night in autumn 2015.
82 per cent of private landlords are not willing to rent to homeless people;
Half of rough sleepers who are UK nationals have a mental health condition