Extract from Wales Assembly statement on homelessness and rough-sleeping - Feb 5

Wednesday, 6 February 2019 07:54

Alun Davies AM: I'm grateful to you for your statement, Minister, and I very much welcome the focus on enabling a greater supply of social housing. I think that's absolutely essential to get to resolve many of the issues we've been debating this afternoon. But also I would like to seek your views on talking about homeless people as human beings, and not simply numbers and statistics. Has the...Request free trial

Alun Davies AM: I'm grateful to you for your statement, Minister, and I very much welcome the focus on enabling a greater supply of social housing. I think that's absolutely essential to get to resolve many of the issues we've been debating this afternoon. But also I would like to seek your views on talking about homeless people as human beings, and not simply numbers and statistics. Has the Government plans to repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824? We're aware that the Vagrancy Act is still in force in parts in Wales, and it does criminalise people who are attempting to live on the streets and who are attempting to create survival strategies whilst living on the street. And we know that this is a pernicious piece of nineteenth century legislation that has no place on the modern statute book. So, I'd be grateful if the Government would outline any plans they would have to repeal that Act, but also, then, introduce new rights for people who are living on the streets. We know, for example, that people who are rough-sleeping do not have access to the medical support that they require, but neither do they have access to things that many of us would take for granted in our daily lives, like access to fresh, clean drinking water, for example. So, as well as repealing the legislation that criminalises people, we also need to ensure that people have the sorts of rights that many people take for granted.

And, finally, Minister, I heard your replies earlier on issues around substance misuse, but I would emphasise to you that I believe that creating a holistic approach to dealing with substance misuse and mental health, which does affect and impact many, many people who are homeless, would impact the ability of people then to sustain their lives in the future. We recognise—I think there's a wide recognition—that at the moment we simply do not have a holistic approach to policy in place; we deal with substance misuse in one place, we deal with mental health, and we deal with housing separately. We need to bring these areas together to enable us to ensure that people who have found themselves homeless are able to be sustained not simply for one night, but able to rebuild their lives.

Julie James AM (Minister for Housing and Local Government): Yes indeed, I completely agree with that. That's, in fact, the complete basis on which the housing-first strategy is based. I mentioned the innovative project in Wrexham that brings all of the services into a single room so that people have ease of access and so on. And the whole purpose of the housing-first approach is that getting somebody into a secure, long-term home that they can regard as home makes it much more obvious that they will be able to access the decent services that come with having an address and a place you call home, whereas, if you're in a ladder of temporary accommodation and so on, you continue to experience the difficulties of not having those permanent services that people have when they have a decent, secure place to live. So, I completely agree with him, and we are looking across the Government at how we can improve the access to services for people who are right on the acute end, the rough-sleepers, but, actually, all the people that Mike Hedges mentioned—the people who are sofa-surfing—and the people that Jenny Rathbone mentioned—family breakdown as a result of serious financial difficulties and so on— that we are all aware of in our communities.

And can I just finish by agreeing with him absolutely that the whole purpose of this is to treat the poor, unfortunate human being who has found themselves in that position as a human being because, frankly, it could happen to any one of us. It's only luck that you don't end up in that circumstance, and so I think we absolutely have to treat each individual as the individual human that they are, and we have to make sure that we have a trauma-centred approach that gives that individual a tailored response.

And, in terms of the Act that he mentioned, we are looking across the piece at the interaction of various legislation, some of which we have the powers to do something about, others that have had unintended consequences—the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, for example, is having unintended consequences in this space—that we will need to work with the UK Government on to secure the changes that we need.

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