MOVING his tanks on to Labour's lawn? Slapping his towel down on Gordon Brown's sunbed? However you describe it, the launch of the new Homelessness Foundation looks to be at the heart of David Cameron's bid to shake off the Conservatives' image as the 'nasty' party. 

'I'm proud because it's the Conservative Party that is taking the lead in the fight against homelessness,' he said in his speech at the launch event. 'That is saying we can build a fairer society and make a difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our country.

That's quite a turnaround for a party that gained a reputation in the 1990s for regarding the homeless as something you stepped over on your way to the opera [even though it was a quote taken out of context] and for dismantling the homelessness legislation.

Change one word in Cameron's speech and he would get a standing ovation at the Labour conference: 'I've put tackling poverty at the heart of my mission for the Conservative Party: 'It's just frankly unacceptable that in a society such as ours - one of the richest and most developed in the world - that some people live in truly dire and degrading poverty. I want to give everyone - no matter what their background or their circumstances - the chance to lift themselves up and make the most of their lives. And an important part of that means tackling homelessness - giving everyone the security that a roof over their head brings.'

He attacked the government for fiddling the figures on rough sleeping, ignoring hidden homelessness and failing to do enough about families in temporary and overcrowded accommodation and argued that action had to be taken on the causes as well as the symptoms of homelesness.

Tories often seem to make the right noises about homelessness only to veer off into moralising about marriage and the family. Family breakdown was there in Cameron's speech yesterday but alongside personal debt, prison rehabilitation and recognition of a fourth cause of homelessness that could be the most important for the future. 'And causes like the severe lack of affordable housing in our country. Taken year on year, there's actually been less social housing built in the last decade than in the two decades before.'

It's not exactly a cast-iron commitment to increase, or even maintain, current levels of spending on affordable housing but it is an important marker and a positive sign for a post-Labour world.

Which is why charities like Shelter and Crisis are surely right to welcome the new initiative and keep up the pressure to ensure that actions follow words.

As Inside Housing reports this week, a Tory housing green paper is due in October. David Cameron could do worse than listen to the Local Government Association and its (Conservative) chairman Sir Simon Milton. The LGA is warning of a 1m increase in waiting lists by 2010 and calling for more freedom for councils to borrow and remortgage assets to reinvest.

Why not go further than the government's plans on freedom from the housing revenue account? 'Tories back council housing' might just have the potential to be the Cameroon equivalent of New Labour scrapping Clause Four.

Posted by Jules Birch, May 16

Posted in Homelessness, Politics

HOMELESSNESS has come to rival mangers, presents and over-induldgence for attention at Christmas and this year was no exception. Crisis was prominent as usual - and called for action to reduce rough sleeping to zero - but an assorted cast of celebrities, politicians, journalists and soap opera characters also got in on the act alongside some local scrooges.

Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps spent Christmas sleeping rough and being interviewed about it. As he admits himself in an article for his local paper, involving the media left him vulnerable to accusations that it was a publicity stunt - but not involving them would make his gesture 'well meaning but largely ignored'.

Also out on the streets was News of the World reporter Daniel Sanderson. who found not the complex mix of issues described by Shapps but one simple one: 'A VICIOUS turf war is erupting on Britain's streets—sparked by a shock invasion of East European DOSSERS'.

Housing minister Yvette Cooper had a late Christmas present for members of the armed forces by making them eligible for shared equity housing loans.

Robbie Williams was helping out in a Los Angeles homeless centre while Eastenders writers made Billy and Honey Mitchell homeless in Eastenders in a plotline that didn't seem to say much for Walford council's housing services or their knowledge of the law on illegal eviction. 

BBC Radio 5 investigated the issues - and Westminster's campaign to ban soup kitchens - in a Christmas special report. 

In the seasonal spirit, a philanthropist organised a New Year's Eve party for homeless people in Swansea, while City bank Credit Suisse helped St Mungo's offer them free phone calls in London. A millionaire who slept in a container while building up his business paid £10,000 to buy them dinner in Aberdeen and citizens of Wolverhampton rallied round to replace Christmas presents stolen from a homeless centre. 

Definitely not in the spirit were local authority staff in Blackpool who rewrote the words to a traditional Christmas song for the Wyre council intranet.  They prompted complaints from a councillor and the local MP. 'I couldn't believe what I was reading,' explained Cllr Ruth Duffy. 'There is a revamp of the Twelve Days of Christmas and they've called it Care and Repair's All Too Real Christmas Carol. It is fine until you get to the eleventh day of Christmas, where it states "Eleven Homeless Griping".'

Happy New Year.

Posted by Jules Birch, Jan 2 

Posted in Homelessness

THOUGH Conservatives have periodically reminded anyone listening over the last decade that they built more social rented homes under John Major than Labour did under Tony Blair, it's taken a change in the political mood to prompt them to take the fight to the government on what has usually been seen as a Labour issue.

Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps has shrugged off the jibes about his opposition to housebuilding in his Welwyn Hatfield constituency to attack the government's record first on rough sleeping and now on homeless children. And the Bow Group, a think-tank from the left of the party, has weighed in with an attack on Labour's record on fuel poverty.

While the arguments about the way official counts underestimate rough sleeping and a 128% rise in the number of homeless children in England are well known to anyone working in those fields, they will perhaps be more surprised to find the Conservatives making them, along with all the arguments about the effect of homelessness on health and education and life chances that they have used for years to lobby the Treasury for more investment in housing.

While many politicians in Shapps's place would have been content with making hay over HIPs and getting headlines in the Telegraph and the Mail, the child homelessness report has taken Shapps into the pages of the Sunday Mirror, Guardian and Independent and left government spokespeople on the defensive. Now Shapps is even apparently talking about sleeping rough himself, denying it's a stunt and saying he wants to call attention to the plight of homeless people.

A high political and media profile for issues like this is undoubtedly good news for housing - but not just because it keeps them in the public eye. What's predictably (and perhaps understandably at this stage in a parliament) missing from Shapps's reports is any commitment to what the Conservatives would do in government. Cynics may question that but every headline he gets now makes it harder for his party to ignore issues like homelessness if it wins the next election.

Posted by Jules Birch, Dec 17 

Posted in Homelessness, Politics , Poverty

THE FALL in homeless acceptances in England is one of the most remarkable housing stories of the the noughties. Figures released this morning by the DCLG show that they fell by 15% in the third quarter of 2007 compared to last year but were up 1% on the previous quarter.

The figures are even more remarkable when you consider that the fall has happened in an environment of escalating affordability problems and a continuing shortage of social tenancies. All things being equal, given those conditions there should have been an increase in acceptances. Instead, they have fallen by more than 50% n the last four years.

But are they too remarkable? Have local authorities just got better at using measures such as rent deposit schemes, tenancy sustainment and family mediation - or has the work been more about preventing homelessness applications than homelessness?

A report by a team from Heriot Watt University published by the DCLG last week [download PDF here] goes some way to providing an answer. Accusations of gatekeeping were one of the reasons it was commissioned - and it did undoubtedly happen in some authorities. The research for the report was completed in 2004 but, along with a generally positive verdict on prevention work, it does identify two particular examples of bad practice: prevention assistance preceding formal homelessness assessment; and the adoption of a stricter definition of having 'a reason to believe' that a household 'may be homeless'.

Many of these problems ought to be resolved by new guidance - last year housing minister Yvette Cooper wrote to all housing authorities reminding them that reductions in acceptances should not be achieved by illegal gatekeeping.

In the meantime, the downward trend continiues, both in homeless acceptances and the number of households in temporary accommodation. It remains to be seen whether the slight increase in acceptances compared to the second quarter is a blip or a sign that the potential of prevention work has reached its limit. 

However, credit must still go to authorities that have been genuinely innovative in their prevention work, with motivations based on finding the best solution rather than to save money. In that spirit, the report makes a series of recommendations about monitoring the future effectiveness of prevention that should improve the national picture. Alongside improvements already introduced in the monitoring regime, measures such as collating figures on homelessness presentations and more assessment of outcomes should go a long way to ensuring that the system works in the interests of all concerned.

Posted by Jules Birch, Dec 10 

Posted in Homelessness

ENGLAND should be proud of its policies on homelessness and social housing, if a new international comparison is anything to go by.

Published by the CLG on Friday and conducted by York University academics working with overseas colleagues, the study compares policy in England and 11 other countries in North America, Western and Eastern Europe and Australia. It provides a rare insight into how different countries have chosen to handles similar issues.

England emerges as the only one of the 12 to give homeless people a right to suitable temporary accommodation while they wait for a permanent home and as among the most liberal in its eligibilty rules for social housing. In many other countries, the homeless are condemned to a social sub-sector, where homes are cheaper and of lower quality.

Meanwhile, England and Germany are the only two countries where homelessness is falling - a phemomenon put down to prevention work - and England and Sweden are the only two that do not have an income limit for access to social housing.

Against this, thanks to the right to buy, England ranks alongside Hungary as one of the countries that have seen a dramatic fall in the social stock and is part of a general trend towards low levels of new build. England also trails way behind Holland in terms of the amount of social housing - housing assocaitions account for 35% of the Dutch stock.

And the big disadvantage of more liberal rules on eligibility for social housing is that it can lead to concentrations of poorer households in particular areas. That in turn makes poverty and inequality harder to combat.

Posted by Jules Birch, Dec 3

Posted in Homelessness, Social housing