Dear editor,
In light of the public discussions around homelessness and purported links to anti-social behaviour in the town centre, I hope to clarify some of the nuances involved to inform further discussions.
I have worked in the homelessness sector for more than 20 years.
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When I started in the sector, I thought homelessness was driven by things like substance use and mental health problems, but now I see that although there is some correlation between these issues, they are not causative.
20 years later, I see these issues as entirely systemic. Supported accommodation has long been relied on as part of the solution to homelessness, even though it causes more problems than it solves.
Much of the supported accommodation in this town is of very poor quality and acts as a breeding ground for social contagions such as substance use and hopelessness.
Victorian-era attitudes
The only reason this model persists is because of the large financial incentives that come from providing HMOs dressed up as supported accommodation, and Victorian-era attitudes towards homelessness, which think that homeless people need do-gooders to show them the way.
We have 400-or-so supported accommodation spaces in the town, which cost the Council millions of pounds every year.
The thing is, many of the spaces are filled with people from outside of Bedford Borough.
Bedford Borough Council itself has come a long way towards acting lawfully towards homeless people, and this is reflected in the 7000% increase in single people in temporary accommodation since 2013 against a national average increase of about 250% in the same period.
This improvement should have been a good thing, as the number of people in Temporary Accommodation went up, the number of people in supported accommodation went down, which was a financial problem for those providers, as they couldn’t claim as much housing benefit.
If they were serious about ending homelessness, they should have had an exit strategy built in to wind down their services.
But they didn’t. Instead, they took people who were homeless in other areas into supported accommodation in Bedford.
Support needs (an umbrella term for substance use, mental health issues, etc.) tend to increase the longer someone stays in supported accommodation.
For those who came from surrounding districts, there was often no access to sustainable move-on options (because these supported accommodation providers often don’t have realistic move-on policies), and so they accrued local connections here.
So if they got evicted, or the accommodation was so bad that it was not legally considered a home anymore, they could approach our Council’s homelessness department for statutory assistance that they were now eligible for.
Stuck in a system
Every homeless person approaching the Council costs something like £15k directly, but there are many other costs involved for other departments/sectors.
This has led to surrounding districts playing hot potato with single homeless people – the people most at risk of deterioration if put into supported accommodation.
Surrounding councils are all too happy to refer someone on their books into Bedford’s supported accommodation, where they get stuck in a system which has inevitably bottlenecked because of this inflow of people.
It is these people who are now stuck in supported accommodation that make up many of the numbers targeted by anti-social behaviour initiatives in the town centre.
A much more sensible approach would be to examine the conditions they are living in that would explain the desire to get wasted in St Peter’s Garden – conditions that many supported accommodation providers get millions of pounds to provide.
Formalised process needed
The incoming Supported Housing Act gives the Council powers to target poor-quality supported accommodation. Until now, the Council has had little power to regulate them.
I hope that the Council makes the most of this opportunity, the first step of which needs to be a formalised process whereby decision-makers in the Council, along with councillors, can hear directly from people living in supported accommodation in a way which mitigates the risks to them of speaking out (which include the risk of being evicted).
Without this direct line to the truth, decisions will continue to be based on what the providers tell the Council rather than what is really happening.
And that requires the Council to exhibit genuine curiosity about the issue, which I have not seen a lot of so far – in my opinion, there is something about the DNA of Bedford Borough Council which prevents it from hearing unpleasant truths and enabling honest discourse with its partners and the public.
Mike Hyden
Director
Homelessness Best Practice
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