While the Housing Bill is moving in the right direction on homelessness, amending the priority need status of prison leavers is a retrograde step
SHELTER CYMRU HAS long argued for a new approach to homelessness that puts people before process, in order to meet needs more fairly and effectively than the current system. In many ways the Housing Bill’s homelessness proposals appear to be moving in this general direction.
The new universal prevention service will be available to everyone, regardless of their status. This will help to reduce pressure on services to ‘carry out investigations’ so that frontline staff can get on with the job of helping people.
Similarly, the commitment to end family homelessness by 2019 is an important step that will help to ensure brighter, more secure futures for hundreds of families every year who are currently trapped in cycles of repeat homelessness. Research by organisations including Shelter Cymru has indicated that the intentional homelessness test in its current form excludes many vulnerable households from assistance.
For households with children the impacts can be particularly detrimental so it is encouraging to see the Government putting prevention before punishment.
There are numerous other moves that also point in this direction, including an increased emphasis on the ‘Housing First’ approach for entrenched rough sleepers. The general underlying principle is that housing is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for helping people to improve their lives.
This is why it is so disappointing that the Welsh Government appears to be moving in the opposite direction when it comes to homeless prison leavers.
Priority need
The Homeless Persons (Priority Need) (Wales) Order 2001, which gave priority need to homeless prison leavers, was passed by Government in recognition of the fact that prison leavers are at greater risk of reoffending if they are homeless.
Until that point prison leavers in Wales had to prove vulnerability in order to be housed. It was the imprecision of that test, which left many vulnerable prison leavers excluded, that led to the 2001 Order being passed.
Housing is necessary
The Government today does not dispute the evidence suggesting that housing is necessary to help prevent reoffending. What seems to have changed is its faith in the system to meet the housing needs of prison leavers in the absence of the legal safety net that the Order provided.
At Shelter Cymru we work with more than 500 homeless prison leavers every year and in our experience they are much more likely than any other homeless group to come up against resistance from local authority services.
Last year 32 per cent of our homeless prison leaver clients experienced ‘gatekeeping’, compared to 17 per cent of our homeless clients overall.
Making the vulnerability test watertight in this environment of long-standing distrust and intense pressures on local authority resources will be extremely challenging.
An even more challenging problem is how to assist homeless prison leavers effectively via the new prevention service. The reality is that there are far too few housing and related support options for this client group.
Typically there are extensive waiting lists for supported accommodation, and there are few private landlords willing to agree to accommodate former prisoners. Our support service, Prison Link Cymru, has great difficulty making successful referrals to private landlords even via lettings agencies that specialise in accommodating prison leavers.
Among our prison leaver clients there is a high level of unmet support need: many are care leavers and many have mental health conditions and substance misuse issues.
Unless there is substantial investment in both accommodation and support, it is unlikely that the prevention service will be able to meet these complex needs effectively, leaving many homeless prison leavers with no temporary accommodation and no option other than to sleep rough.
In our experience the first night post-release is critical. If people have to spend their first night on the streets or in a shelter, this considerably increases the likelihood of reoffending. For most of our clients this means falling back into substance misuse and from there to acquisitive crime.
Reversal of position
The reversal of the Welsh Government’s position on priority need and prison leavers has not been made in response to evidence, which is entirely lacking in this area because no research has ever been carried out into the impacts of the 2001 Order.
It is disappointing to see such a retrograde step, when the overall shift in homelessness policy is towards principles of equality and fairness.
At the very least, we hope that the Government will recognise the need to carry out early prevention work in custody. We argue that prisoners should be able to access the service 56 days prior to release, in line with the new definition of homelessness.
This needs to accompany substantial investment to ensure that accommodation and support is in place to give people a fighting chance of improving their lives.