wales Archives - Red Brick

The Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru, Tai Pawb and Shelter Cymru are the Back the Bill coalition in Wales. It has been campaigning to incorporate the right to adequate housing (RTAH) in Wales since 2019. This June, following a Programme for Government commitment between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru a Green Paper on securing a path to adequate housing, including fair rents and affordability, has been published. The leaders of the three organisations fronting the campaign, Matt Dicks, Ruth Power, and Alicja Zalesinska, look at why introducing the right to adequate housing should be a key response to the housing crisis in Wales.

“If not now, then when?” is a question we often ask ourselves as campaign partners. When there are almost 90,000 people on social housing waiting lists and 10,221 in Temporary Accommodation, the housing crisis in Wales is inescapable. Too many lives are blighted by inadequate homes. As well as ruining people’s lives, poor housing costs the NHS in Wales £95 million per year. It is widely recognised that Wales is the birthplace of the NHS solving a 20^th Century endemic issue of poor (public) health. Our predecessors did not wait for enough hospitals doctors and nurses to form the NHS – they recognised legislation would drive it and got on with it. That’s the approach we should take now and incorporate a right to adequate housing in Wales.

In Wales, Many of us Agree Housing is a Human Right

We’re fortunate in Wales that we have governments with a history of looking at the bigger picture, whether it’s through the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, becoming an anti-racist nation or incorporating the rights of the child. In housing too, our 2014 Housing Act has been praised for its focus on prevention and replicated elsewhere in the UK. So, the positive starting point is that Welsh Government recognises the challenge of the housing crisis and the importance of the right to adequate housing. Indeed, earlier this month, the Minister for Climate Change, Julie James, told the Local Government and Housing Committee, “…it’s a fundamental human right that you are adequately housed, and that is the mark of a civilised society that we can adequately house our citizens.”

Human Rights Must be Placed at the Centre of Housing Reform

Perhaps given this standpoint, it is surprising that the recently published Green Paper is a bit underwhelming, missing the transformative potential of incorporation and the benefits of progressive realisation in delivering it – essentially introducing the right over time alongside additional resource and increasing housing supply. While the Programme for Government references ‘a right to adequate housing,’ there is an absence in the Green Paper of a strong discourse on human rights. And this matters. If adequate housing is a human right and the mark of a civilised society, it stands to question how it hasn’t been achieved by now.

This Matters Because…

It’s not just enough to talk about human rights, but important to embed, protect and nurture them. Rather than talk about housing as a human right – a statement nearly all of us will agree with – it’s necessary to incorporate these rights to drive through change. This is how we secure a long-term, joined up and sustainable solution to the housing crisis. Unfortunately, this is not recognised in the Green Paper, which is almost silent on incorporation, and importantly, the value of incorporation. Instead, there is a focus on what adequate looks like – which while welcome fails to understand the full benefits of incorporation including tackling inequality and participation for communities in housing.

While the Green Paper sets out a number of well-informed proposals to implement progressive policies, these are in effect reduced to discretionary priorities which are vulnerable, as policy always is, to changing priorities. There is no solid legal foundation that future generations could use as a basis to argue for progressive housing policies in Wales.

The Green Paper stage is all about evidence and concepts – for the right to adequate housing, the most fundamental concept is that of progressive realisation, where the full right is introduced over time. We feel the Green Paper also misunderstands the role of progressive realisation in securing incorporation. Rather than seeing incorporation as the driver of change, the individual changes required are presented as barriers to incorporation with a right to adequate housing presented as the culmination of change; completely missing the point of incorporation.

For housing in Wales, ambition is critical. However, as we stand now, the housing crisis is deepening. Tinkering around the edges with individual reforms hasn’t worked to date, so there can be no reason to expect it will in the future. We feel a right to adequate housing is the foundation of ambition, driving the long-term, joined-up and wholesale change required. Incorporation can drive the changes required to ensure everyone has a safe, suitable home they can afford.

We’d be naïve to not recognise legitimate concerns to our alternative vision but hear us out – none of these are insurmountable.

Of course, the right to adequate housing will cost money – but independent cost-benefit analysis has shown that it will deliver savings of £11.5 billion for the Welsh public purse against a cost of £5billion over a 30-year period.

It will mean change for housing and support providers, including local authorities – but this change means doing existing things better and leveraging in additional resources. All local authorities want good homes for their citizens and taxpayers without having to use inappropriate, expensive and unsuitable hotels as Temporary Accommodation.

We also recognise the fear around increased litigation. However, progressive realisation means the right to adequate housing is realised over time – not overnight. And with the maximum available resource committed, there will be no immediate increase in litigation, nor is there any international evidence to suggest it. Indeed, the outcome is greater supply and better standards across the board. Fear and risk of immediate litigation could also be mitigated through a ‘sunrise clause’ in any future Act, giving the government and public bodies time to progress their policies before the right is justiciable and fully recognised.

For us, it is clear that the time to act and bring about positive, long-lasting change is now. We believe that legislation to incorporate the right to adequate housing into Welsh law is the starting point that provides the paradigm shift in the way we view housing and the investment and prominence it is given in the wider public policy debate in Wales to deliver the long-lasting change that we, as housing professionals, all aspire to delivering.

Matt Dicks is Director of CIH Cymru; Alicja Zalesinska is Chief Executive of Tai Pawb; Ruth Power is Chief Executive of Shelter Cymru. Together, the three organisations represent the ‘Back the Bill’ campaign.

We can’t end homelessness without sweeping legal reform

The four nations of the UK have some of the most generous legal entitlements for people facing homelessness. The legacy of Cathy Come Home is the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977. Since then more than four million households have been helped into alternative housing because they qualify for this almost unique addition to a western welfare state.

Over the years, this settlement has been changed and expanded. Devolved government in Scotland and Wales has charged progress with the former abolishing the idea of non-priority homelessness between 2003 and 2012, and the latter legislating for homelessness prevention in 2014. The landmark Homelessness Reduction Act (2017) introduced prevention formally into law in a similar way in England.

This seemingly progressive settlement hides a multitude of sins. Under the surface it is largely a battleground between homeless ‘applicants’, and local councils who are charged with using the legalistic framework as a rationing tool for scarce housing stock and social support.

Should you find yourself homeless in 21^st century Britain here is your challenge:

Are you someone with the right immigration status? Living and working in the UK for years, paying taxes for decades even, is not a guarantee, especially if the state tells you that you have ‘no recourse to public funds’.

Are you at fault for your own homelessness? This bizarre concept of ‘intentionality’ exists to stop the mythical scrounging masses from claiming falsely, but if for example you have rent arears, as thousands do through no fault of their own, then bad luck.

Are you from the local council area you are applying to? Do you have uninterrupted proof over a period of years? If not, you’re out.

Are you in one of the stated ‘priority need’ groups? This one has been seen off in Scotland, but everywhere else you have to have dependent children or qualify under one of the other limited descriptions. If your situation isn’t on the list, then your last shot at this one is appealing to the council to deem you in some way ‘vulnerable’.

Let’s say you haven’t fallen foul of one or more of these – and here is the real kicker – what if the council has nowhere to offer you anyway?!

The system is quixotic. Cash and housing strapped councils are spending their time fighting off legal challenges that their decisions were unlawful. People are sent hundreds of miles to live in squalor because local social housing has been converted or sold, or because the private rental market is too expensive. Private consultants scurry about the system, offering new innovations in gatekeeping it from applicants to grateful housing officers.

The pandemic has brought this murky system into the light. When Louise Casey sent her now famous ‘Everyone In’ email to English councils at the end of March, she basically told them to forget the last 43 years of litigious argument. The instruction on a Wednesday evening to get everyone off the street by the weekend was an instruction to do the right thing and ignore the rules. And in Scotland and Wales, the pandemic responses went even further, with councils given more generous funding settlements and directives from ministers about the public health emergency.

These efforts have been the exception that proves an important rule – that if you offer legal routes out of homelessness for some, you make it inevitable for others.

For a few weeks the numbers on the street went dramatically down, and gave the public a glimpse of a future without rough sleeping. Politicians have seen that decisive intervention can have dramatic and positive results. And as an unnamed Conservative politician said in the Times last week: ‘My worry is that we’ve shown it is possible to get everyone off the streets during the Covid crisis so if homelessness goes up now people will know it’s as a consequence of government’s actions.’

So, what now? How should we build on the extraordinary efforts of the last six months? And how do we apply the short-term successes of reductions in rough sleeping to the wider homelessness response?

Our first principle should be to move from incomplete legal entitlements, to a universal model of guarantee that anyone facing homelessness is helped to avoid or quickly resolve it. The current model is cruel in its legally sanctioned denial of help to thousands every year. But it also labels people. You are ‘the homeless’, you should be grateful for what you get, and if you get nothing, soon the labels keep coming: single homeless, entrenched, complex, service-resistant, etc.

Let’s abolish the legal tests that create and sustain homelessness.

Second, the Everyone In initiative was a fleeting glimpse of assertive state action on homelessness in England. Louise Casey has come and now gone again, officially moving on in late July, leaving the UK government rudderless once again. Devolving the problem to the myriad responses of each local council is fundamentally flawed and we know all too well what that leads to – with every measure of homelessness in England going up in the last ‘decade of disaster’, under the cloak of decentralised but declining resources.

Governments in Scotland and Wales have recently begun an overhaul of their homelessness systems. This rediscovery of assertiveness and vision is desperately needed in England too, and a blueprint is written in the Crisis plan for ending homelessness. There are solutions ready and waiting, from scaling up Housing First, to the case for social housing at scale, PRS reform, etc. And the good news is that financially these reforms easily pay for themselves over a 10-year period.

The current government target of ending rough sleeping by the end of the parliament is the first of its kind. Rough sleeping is of course the most damaging for of homelessness. But in order to reach this goal, we need a consensus across all political parties on wider basis.

Since 1977 the legal system has designed in homelessness. This must be reversed, and replaced with a universal guarantee of housing support, and then backed by an assertive government strategy to make homelessness in all its guises a thing of the past.

Matthew Downie

Director of Policy and External Affairs, Crisis. Matt, who joined Crisis in 2014, played a leading role in the introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act – one of the biggest reforms to homelessness legislation in England in a generation – as well as the publication of ‘Everybody In: How to end homelessness in Great Britain’, a landmark body of work showing how homelessness can be ended for good. He was awarded an MBE for his services to tackling homelessness in June 2019.

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