Duty to provide advisory services

Part of Homelessness Reduction Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:15 am on 30 November 2016.

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Photo of Helen Hayes Helen Hayes Labour, Dulwich and West Norwood 10:15, 30 November 2016

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I am pleased to see this clause in the Bill. I particularly welcome the emphasis that runs throughout the Bill on shifting resources into prevention, so that we stop as many as people as possible becoming homeless in the first place.

The Bill will drive a change in culture and we need legislation to drive that change in many local authorities. The culture that prevails has come about because the existing requirements on local authorities, as well as the pressure of resources, force councils into a position in which they support the people they have to support. Resources are not currently available to support all the people councils have to support, and it is necessarily the case that many people fall outside the scope of local authority support. I agree entirely that local authorities should have the flexibility to devise and design services at local level that are appropriate to the needs that present themselves.

The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole indicated that he does not believe the provision of advice services constitutes a set of new burdens on local authorities, but we delude ourselves if we think the provision of meaningful advice does not constitute a series of resourcing requirements that result in a set of new burdens on local authorities. It is important that the Committee acknowledges what we mean and the implications of the clause for local authorities. We should ensure that the clause can be effective in delivering the outcomes that we all want.

I am a member of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. I too heard and saw the evidence that that Committee received during the homelessness inquiry. We saw evidence of local authorities being unable to support many people presenting as homeless in two different categories. We saw evidence of very poor practice—that came through strongly from the Crisis mystery shopper exercise. Some local authorities were simply not interested in helping or advising anybody they did not have to advise. In some cases, even people eligible for support were not receiving support of any kind of quality or meaningfulness. We also saw overwhelming evidence that the systems that exist to support homeless people in local authorities are at breaking point—they are overwhelmed.

The problem faced by many local authorities is to do with the wider housing crisis that we face in this country. We saw evidence of advice that was not up to date, as other hon. Members have said. Referral to third-party organisations that are already overstretched is a common form of advice. Local authorities are saying, “Go and see the local advice agency, go to the local law centre, go to the citizens advice bureau.” Residents turning up to those places find that they have to wait in a long queue and that they cannot get an appointment immediately, and then find that those agencies are not in a position to provide meaningful advice because the housing that people ultimately need is simply not available. We saw evidence that advice was being provided for people to contact organisations that could and should be able to provide alternative housing, but which themselves had been forced to increase their threshold for accessing their support.

I have an example of a constituent who was given a list of organisations that she could telephone who would provide alternative housing because that was what she needed. She phoned them. As a single person, she was not considered to be in priority need, and every one of those organisations required a nomination from a local authority in order to access their services. Such advice is not in any way meaningful.

I want to ensure that we introduce clause 2, and that it will result in the provision of meaningful advice to people seeking support from local authorities. The provision of meaningful advice is to a large degree about the provision of meaningful options. I can say to my constituent, “I advise you to contact your local authority to seek their support with housing.” The local authority will say, “We simply do not have any social housing available and we have a list of many thousands of people already waiting for that housing.” That is not meaningful advice for me to provide to my constituent. We need to focus on the issue of meaningfulness.

Two things are important in ensuring that we deliver: first, we need to be clear that, in introducing a new duty, it cannot be acceptable for a local authority to discharge their duty, and to be considered to have discharged their duty, by providing advice that is poor quality or out of date, or not the best possible advice that can be provided. I flag up to Government Members the need for the provision of detailed guidance to accompany the Bill to make it clear to local authorities what constitutes the discharge of their duty to provide advice. The guidance would also make it clear that the Government will not stand for the continued practice of passing the buck to external agencies who cannot themselves provide that advice, resulting in a situation in which people are not meaningfully helped. Detailed guidance is important.

Secondly, we need to locate the clause firmly within the wider debate about the expansion of housing provision, including social housing, and the expansion of support for advice and support agencies that people need when they are at risk of becoming homeless. I wish to assert my view that the clause imposes new burdens on local authorities, and I would like a response from the Government on the question of what resources will be made available to enable those new burdens to be met. Otherwise we give ourselves a pat on the back in this House that we have enacted something that talks about the provision of advice. If the measure does not make the necessary difference on the ground, we have failed and we will be held to account. With those remarks, I am pleased to support the clause.