Casey calls for more action to prevent homelessness

Former government adviser Dame Louise Casey has called for a stronger emphasises in Whitehall on preventing homelessness.

Speaking in front of the housing, communities and local government select committee, Dame Louise who was the architect behind the government’s Everyone In policy, said rough sleeping is ‘a systematic failure’.

She told MPs that when the government first introduced the Everyone In policy last year, they expected to have to find accommodation for between 5,000 and 6,000 people.

But she added that the figure quickly rose to 29,000, with between 9,000 and 10,000 still in temporary accommodation.

Her appearance in front of the committee follows a report by the National Audit Office, which warned the Everyone In programme had exposed the scale of the homeless crisis in the UK.

‘I do not feel that there is a strong enough prevention of homelessness strategy,’ she added.

‘That is not just about things like local housing allowance, which are all definite issues, or even things such as routing people from prison to the street.

‘During the pandemic, while I was still there, we had people coming out of hospital and ending up at risk of rough sleeping, and we had people coming out of prison.

‘Those things drive me insane, because they are preventable. I cannot look after a child who has come from a tough background, ends up in care and then comes back out again. I would like to do that, and I have had a go at that in other jobs,’ Dame Louise told MPs.

‘The fact that people end up as drug addicts or have major alcohol problems, and the fact that their route to help is the street, is a failure. For me, the system has to look at how you solve that.

‘I thought, “They don’t want me to do that.” What they needed me to do was to put my shoulder to the wheel and get as many people in as possible and make sure we held it all. We achieved that, and it has not massively unravelled. If anything, that team has continued to do it and it has enjoyed massive political support from all parties, certainly at local level. People have been up for it. But it is not a rough sleeping strategy, and that is the thing for me,’ added Dame Louise.

And she said the issue of some people having no recourse to public funds is a ‘pragmatic nightmare’.

‘When the lockdown lifted—I always think of social welfare problems as an overflowing bath. If you want to solve an overflowing bath, the first thing you do when you run into the bathroom is switch the taps off. You have to prevent the problem in the first place. We spend a lot of our time dealing with what is in the bath and clearing up after it. We don’t spend enough time on prevention,’ said Dame Louise.

Photo Credit – PublicDomainPictures (Pixabay)