If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'

Some of that vital, precious 'green belt'

Last night was shockingly cold and damp in Leeds yet, as usual, the streets of the city centre were dotted with the homeless. Most seemed almost too busy not freezing to death to hold out that familiar battered coffee cup in the hope of a little change. There were, to be fair, rather fewer aggressive drunks than normal but, for all the buzz of a city in the last few days before Christmas, it is sobering that we still have so many people camped out on the street without a home or even the hope of a home.

There are good people, far better and kinder than me, who help these homeless people - providing them with hot food, running hostels and pointing them towards places that can help with problems other than simply not having a home. But this work is just a sicking plaster over a seeping gash in our civilised society. In a world were we say we care too many argue for and support policies that would, for all their apparent goodness, just act to make things worse. We see calls for rent controls without seeing that big US cities with those controls - San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles - are homelessness crises far worse than the ones we have in Britain. And we see people pointing to a host of other problems, from addiction and mental health to the jobs market or bad landlords - almost never housing supply let alone the planning system.

But in the end the main reason for homelessness - whether its an ex-serviceman with PTSD bunking down in a Leeds shop doorway or a family crammed into a damp and mouldy B&B - is the simple fact of not having a home. Yes it's true that sometimes the actions of the homeless have contributed to their circumstances - financial crisis, debt, drugs and booze, violence - but it's also true that, in the end, the way to stop people being homeless is to get them a home. So the fact that there aren't enough homes doesn't just matter because Zeke and Jocasta can't afford to buy a house, it matters because if we don't get more homes we aren't going to stand a chance of finding a home for those sad men and women on our streets, for the family huddled in a bedsit or the young couple in South London cooped up in Mum's back bedroom because there's nowhere they can find to rent.

Lots of words have been poured our describing how we might resolve the problem - not everywhere but certainly in London, Bristol, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester - of there simply not being enough housing supply to meet the demand for housing. And remember that this isn't about shortages in one or other tenure (not enough social housing, too few hostel places, no affordable homes to buy) but about the whole supply, all the homes. Turning some of those homes from one tenure to another or taking up scarce housing land for new council housing simply doesn't solve the problem it just shifts it to another part of the market.

Everyone with their brain switched who looks seriously at the problem comes to the same conclusion. The problem lies with our planning system. Sometimes this results in things that increase supply but at a horrible cost in civilized living while in other places we get a new generation of soul-destroying, anti-family high-rise living. We see people saying we can meet the need without changing how we draw up plans - essentially by getting the houses built somewhere else. Usually this refers to a mystical thing called "brownfield land" - acres of previously developed land across our cities on which giant skyscrapers can be built into which all the poor peons and saps of city living can be crammed. All this so a fortunate few can look across a dull piece of agricultural monoculture devoid of most of its historic wildlife and utterly lacking in any amenity value beyond being there and being a field.

"Save the Green Belt" proclaim the leaflets of candidates from every political party. "Brownfield first" scream politicians from left and right. Even the housing "sector", dominated by local council officers and folk from social housing businesses, doesn't mention planning reform - just give us billions of other people's money, say Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation, and we'll solve the housing crisis. But they won't because all they'll do is take housing land that's already allocated out of the market and build homes for social rent. Without more land all we do is move the problem about. For sure we might fix the problem for the poorest and most vulnerable (a good thing) but at the cost of making it even less likely that young people with good education and good jobs can do what their parents did and buy a house.

I don't hold out much hope that government will come to its senses and reform the planning system but let me give them a way to do it. We'll start by accepting that all those MPs and councillors elected on the back of "saving the green belt" aren't going to roll over and agree to scrapping our disastrous policy of urban containment. So let's reform it. And the simplest way to do this is to change what 'green belt' means - not the five purposes (three of which are essentially the same thing) but the manner in which we treat applications on that green belt. Right now a 'green belt' designation comes with a presumption against development (or a presumption that the 'openness of the green belt' will be preserved) - if we removed that presumption and treated 'green belt' as a significant material consideration instead then it would be possible to prevent unnecessary sprawl, avoid the merging of communities, protect important environments and encourage the reuse of redundant developed land but not at the cost of constraining land supply to the point where it creates a housing crisis.

If you want - and I do - to live in a society that values everyone and where we can house the homeless so as to support them into a better life, then you can't be a NIMBY, you can't go to the barricades to prevent Barratts or Wimpy building a few hundred houses on the fields over the back. If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'.

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People who live on the streets more likely to be smokers (and other unsuprising facts)

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Mind you this doesn't stop homelessness charity Thames Reach from getting all hot and bothered about the fact:

More needs to be done to help the homeless population quit smoking as a high proportion of those in hostels are found to be smokers, a survey has found.

Research by homelessness charity Thames Reach, released only to Inside Housing, shows more than 73 per cent of service users were smokers.

The idiots at Thames Reach then go on to talk about diabetes (which isn't closely linked to smoking in the way that it is to poor diet). It seems to me that the least of our worries about the street homeless is whether or not they smoke - we should bother instead about the factors behind their situation whether that be mental health difficulties, breakdown or simple economics.

Tobacco might be expensive but for these people that little warm buzz from a fag might be the only little pleasure they get on the average evening. And these nannying fussbuckets at Thames Reach want to take that away from them.

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Housing crisis! What housing crisis?

A great deal of column inches are being dedicated to England’s housing crisis - mostly coming from the ranks of housing organisations themselves:

Is a dysfunctional housing market creating Generation Rent, with most young people permanently frozen out of home-ownership by huge deposits, shortage of supply and high property prices?

The National Housing Federation thinks so. Research it commissioned from Oxford Economics foresees an ‘unprecedented crisis’ with the proportion of households living in an owner-occupied home falling to just under 64pc over the next decade, compared with a peak of 72.5pc in 2001.

This prediction is based on assumptions of soaring private rents, long waiting lists for social housing, and a new house price boom, all driven by an under-supply of properties.

The core point of this analysis lies in that final sentence – the ‘under-supply’ of homes. Now there are two possible ways to answer the question as to whether we have an ‘under-supply’ – data on homelessness (it would seem logical that when there are too few houses there will be more people without houses) and figures for house prices (excess demand will drive prices upwards).

The problem is that neither of these measures actually tells us that we have an under-supply of homes right at the moment. The latest official homelessness statistics show a sharp increase:

During the 2010/11 financial year, there were 44,160 acceptances. This is an increase from 40,020 (10 per cent) in 2009/10 - the first financial year increase since 2003/04

On the face of it this is a problem – but is it due to a lack of housing? Or are people becoming homeless for other reasons? And bear in mind that all of those ‘homeless’ people will be housed – sometimes in temporary accommodation (although these numbers are falling).

So we need to look elsewhere. If there really is a crisis – that we really don’t have enough houses – then we would expect the numbers of people sleeping rough to rise. Indeed, given that the most vulnerable and least well off are most likely to be homeless, we might expect these figures to have risen during the “crisis”.

The latest figures (and we should treat them with caution a quite a few genuinely homeless people don’t get counted) show that 1,768 people were sleeping rough at the time of the count. While we should be concerned about these numbers they again do not suggest a “crisis”.

The reality is that, despite an unprecedented surge in population and a rising birth rate, we are managing to provide housing for all but a very few. This does not speak to me of ‘crisis’ but of a problem being managed.

So why do the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Royal Town Planning Institute, charities like Shelter all tell us that there’s a housing crisis – something demanding of urgent, if not immediate, action?

The central part of these organisations’ argument is that to address this housing ‘crisis’ it requires government to provide more subsidy – ideally in the form of direct capital grants to affordable housing providers. Here’s the NHF again:

At the heart of the problem remains a chronic under-supply of new homes. In 2010/11 just 105,000 homes were built in England – the lowest level since the 1920s.

More government investment in affordable housing would stimulate a wider, faster economic recovery and help fix our broken housing markets, according to the Federation.

There are some huge challenges facing the housing sector – not helped by a sclerotic planning system, the stickiness of house prices and a social housing sector that has, since the 1980s, lived on a steady diet of government subsidy via direct grant funding. But we do not have a crisis, there isn’t a huge increase in people without houses – if there were these problems then house builders would be tripping over each other to build new homes to satisfy that pent up demand. That they aren’t suggests to me that we can be more considered in our approach to housing.

This talk of crisis seems mostly to be special pleading from a sector so used to public subsidy it doesn’t know how to operate in the real housing market.

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The riotous looters were delightful weren't they!

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From a report in Inside Housing:

Homeless people in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool were robbed and beaten, according to homelessness charities operating in affected areas.

In Manchester three rough sleepers had their bedding set alight, one rough sleeper was attacked and another was beaten and had his mobile phone, money and laptop stolen.

In Birmingham a rough sleeper’s jaw was broken in an assault, another was threatened with a knife and a third was forced to go looting by rioters but escaped because he was too slow to keep up with the mob.

In Liverpool homelessness outreach teams said they found rough sleepers with black eyes and cuts but that the victims would not identify their assailants. The city’s YMCA said it had homeless people coming in complaining of ‘violent threats’ from rioters.

Thames Reach, a London-based homelessness charity, said it had received reports of a rough sleeper being mugged in Lewisham.

Terrible stuff (although one wonders about a rough sleeper with a laptop and a mobile phone and about the truth of "being forced to go looting").

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Westminster and the homeless - how UK Uncut are completely wrong and misleading

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The latest UK Uncut fib relates to Westminster Council's proposals to "fine the homeless":

Westminster city council, the richest and most powerful council in the UK, is proposing a new bye-law to ban rough sleeping and “soup runs” in the Victoria area of London. The proposed new bye-law will make it an offence punishable by a fine to “sleep or lie down”, “deposit materials used as bedding” and to “give out, or permit another to give out, food for free”.

Clearly this is the work of Evil Tories as they crush the poor and vulnerable? How very dare they!

But when you look briefly into the matter it doesn't quite seem that way at all:

Westminster Council wants to pass a byelaw to stop rough sleeping and soup runs on Westminster Cathedral piazza and the surrounding area.

Westminster Council announced yesterday it has launched a consultation on the proposals with residents, businesses, local day centres and hostels and the voluntary sector.

If it gets a positive response from this, it will ask the Communities and Local Government department to pass a byelaw. It wants this in place by October.

Westminster Council estimates up to 100 people at a time congregate around the piazza while food is being given out and said people travel into the area to receive food hand-outs. The council has said vulnerable adults will be asked to leave the area before being subjected to any enforcement.

So why is the Council doing this? Here's a representative of homeless charity St Mungo's on the subject:

‘While we recognize the compassion involved in providing food to vulnerable people, those in distress and rough sleeping need services that will support them off the streets for good and give them the opportunity for longer term better housing, health and work as they move on with their lives.’

And, for good measure the Chief Executive of another homeless charity, Thames Reach:

‘Street handouts do little to help people make the step away from rough sleeping. Instead they frequently prevent people from facing up to the reality of the harmful lifestyle they have adopted.

‘The Westminster Cathedral piazza and surrounding area has been the focus for soup run activity and rough sleeping for many years and this has inevitably had a detrimental impact on the lives of people living and working in the immediate vicinity.’

So it seems that, in truth Westminster are working alongside homeless charities to try and deliver better support to rough sleepers!

So UK Uncut lied?

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