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‘Inability to manage immigration properly’ is causing rough sleeping, claims former homelessness tsar
The country’s “inability to manage immigration properly” has become one of the causes of homelessness and the government’s rough sleeping team is forced to deal with “systemic failure elsewhere” in the system, the former homelessness tsar has said.
Speaking at a Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee meeting today, Dame Louise Casey, who has worked as an advisor on homelessness under both Labour and Conservative governments, said immigration has become a bigger cause of homelessness than it was in the past.
She said: “When I was the homelessness tsar under the Labour administration, economic migrants were not a feature that I ever worried about.
“We didn’t have essentially one of the causes of homelessness being migration…
“Cutting straight to it and, sorry, being utterly direct, I think that that essentially one of the causes of rough sleeping is a sort of inability to manage immigration properly.”
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Dame Louise was hired by the government in February last year to oversee a review into its rough sleeping policy in light of the Conservatives’ manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping by 2024.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, she shifted roles to oversee the government’s Everyone In scheme, which attempted to house all rough sleepers in self-contained emergency accommodation such as hotels and B&Bs. However, she stepped away from her role in August.
Dame Louise told the HCLG Committee that some of the people housed in the hotels included “economic migrants that didn’t have their papers, but with a lot of effort could get their papers and could become settled citizens”.
She also said the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government’s rough sleeping team ended up “dealing with systemic failure elsewhere” in the system.
Dame Louise said the government’s no recourse to public funds policy, which sees individuals denied access to benefits based on their immigration status, was a “pragmatic nightmare” and that she does not agree with the government’s post-Brexit immigration rules which define rough sleeping as a reason for an individual’s ‘leave to remain’ to be revoked.
“For me that was just a bit of big politics that just didn’t help us at that particular moment,” she said on the latter.
Dame Louise also shed light on her decision to step down from her role as homelessness tsar in August last year.
She told the committee that she resigned in part to focus on her new role in the House of Lords and in part because she was originally hired to oversee the government’s review into homelessness rather than the immediate response to the pandemic.
Since she stepped down from her role, charities have called on the government to replace Dame Louise and reaffirm its commitment to carrying out a review into its homelessness strategy.
However, Dame Louise said she thinks the government should remain focused on the pandemic at the moment and revisit the review when “normality returns”.
She said her and housing secretary Robert Jenrick’s “doors are open to each other”.
