Clause 27 - allocation schemes
Homes Bill
9:45 am
Mr Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
My hon. Friend is right. I shall argue that there are other means and agencies for dealing with ex-offenders, starting with the institutions from which they have come. There is a duty of care on those institutions when releasing offenders, particularly if releasing them early and on parole, to have regard to the circumstances and surroundings into which those people are being released. If they simply open the door and turf them out on to the street without any regard to what will happen to them and what educational benefits and so on they have had in prison, surely the chances that they will reoffend and end up back where they started are that much greater. My hon. Friend mentioned the halfway houses, which have some expertise and a good record in dealing with some of this category of potentially homeless people.
Various institutions are worried that all housing will go to the homeless, with less for those who wait patiently on the register. More responsibility for the homeless is being passed to local authorities, with little extra money to meet the cost. Soundings have been taken from various councils. One says:
``We will have fewer choices on the way we run our register and allocate the Council's housing...This is further evidence of centralisation.''
Another says:
``If the groups of people''
that we
``must assist are extended then the choice available to existing priorities will decrease. We will be obliged to assist more people and this will be at the expense of the Council. Clearly more people will be placed in B&B accommodation. There are no new resources promised to help councils meet the extended obligation. This has clear council tax implications.''
Another says:
``The city council has concerns regarding the intention to place the duty on local authorities to rehouse those from an institutionalised background such as prisons and the armed forces. Whilst fully recognising that a number of rough sleepers come from an institutionalised background, we are nevertheless concerned that a broadly drafted requirement to rehouse such applicants without sufficient regard to vulnerability and need will place an unreasonable and costly burden on inner London boroughs.''
That ties in with what my hon. Friend was saying about liaising with other agencies, which have a specific expertise in this area quite separate from placing a general duty on local authorities.
I believe that it is all summed up by one of my own local authorities, which made the stark point that:
``All the powers and duties in the world will not make any real difference to people's chances without an increase in the supply of housing available to them.''
I fully recognise that there are specific problems with ex-offenders. There are particular problems with housing sex offenders, which need to be dealt with very delicately, using a host of agencies from the police and social services and specialised organisations. That responsibility should not just be dumped on local authorities because—despite what the Minister said on Second Reading, the logic of which is badly flawed—given the finite amount of available accommodation, any addition to the list of priority homeless people, however small, however big, however wide, however narrow, must mean that those who are not covered in those priority allocations, particularly those people who become homeless through no fault of their own and do not fall into one of the priority groups, will find themselves lower down the list or will be given the choice of less amenable and less suitable accommodation than they would have been.
The proposed change to the regulation that has been flagged-up by the Government sends out the wrong message. It suggests that those who have been in jail should receive priority over homeless people with unblemished records. That is the message for thousands of people who have been waiting patiently on homeless housing lists. They might now find themselves pushed down that queue because of priority being given to people from an institutionalised background. I would be delighted if the Minister would explain how those circumstances would not arise when there is a finite amount of housing stock available to accommodate all those different types of people. We have tabled the amendment because if the Government take the route that they have flagged up, it will send out the wrong message to those who have to wait far too long and still end up with inadequate accommodation.