When compassion kills

Britain has repealed the Vagrancy Act, ending 200 years of laws banning begging and rough sleeping. According to the government “the Vagrancy Act has been found to punish people simply for not having a home.” Who could object to this, or indeed the argument that “by repealing the outdated Vagrancy Act, we are shifting from punishment to prevention, alongside our investment to tackle homelessness for good.”

Yet here is a curious thing. There are on average nearly five thousand people sleeping rough on a given night in Britain today, of whom over 700 are women. Yet sixty years ago, in 1965, fewer than one thousand people were recorded as rough sleepers on a typical night, of whom only 45 were women. By the mid 60s, homelessness and rough sleeping had become comparatively rare. This was achieved whilst the Vagrancy Act was both in force and more rigorously applied, and over a decade before a statutory right not to be homeless was introduced by the 1977 Housing Act. 

For years, we have been in a state of hopeless confusion on this issue, with debates dominated by sentimental misapprehensions. Two issues, and two very different populations, have been conflated. If you or I were to lose our job and our home, we, in all likelihood, wouldn’t end up on the street — we’d end up relying on family and friends for a while till we got back on our feet, or applying for welfare. That describes most of our growing and ambiguously defined “homeless” population: people in transition, often temporarily locked out of a place of their own due to a broken housing market.

The people who sleep rough are those whose friends and family, if they have them, won’t take them in. They’re those whose lives are too chaotic, or minds too muddled, to navigate or keep to the rules of the welfare system. Many people are homeless due to poverty, debt, and housing costs. But those sleeping on the streets often have a highly complex series of problems around addiction and mental health which may be related to poverty and housing insecurity, but cannot be reduced to them. A significant minority refuse offered accommodation, and a number of beggars are involved in criminal gangs. Another significant segment are migrants and asylum seekers who can’t or won’t access accommodation, with the CSJ’s rough sleeping tracker revealing that over half of London’s rough sleepers are foreign nationals.

We have also conflated begging with homelessness. Yet the majority of beggars are not rough sleepers, with one council revealing that 84 per cent of beggars in the area had accommodation. Councils and charities caution members of the public about the risks of giving to beggars, as the money will often end up fueling addiction or in the hands of criminals.  

Two basic misapprehensions fuel hostility to the Vagrancy Act. People imagine that it criminalises the homeless. But the vast majority of homeless people have somewhere to sleep, and aren’t begging, and are thus not subject to the law. People also tend to think of rough sleepers as primarily victims of poverty or housing insecurity, when in fact they are a population that suffers from complex problems, and includes those who are either deeply anti-social, or suffer from mental illness and addiction. This is not a group that can simply be left to its own devices, and the choice to do so comes with serious costs, both to society and to rough sleepers themselves.

The road which Britain is embarked upon is one that other countries and municipalities have already travelled down. We know what is happening in New York and California, we know where the road ends. Tent cities and open air drug markets, drugs consumed on public transport, mentally ill people attacking and even killing members of the public, public spaces made frightening and ugly. This collapse of civic life and social order is not far off. In London I’ve witnessed people taking crack at bus stops, I’ve been attacked by a mentally ill man in a tube station, I see beggars screaming at each other in the streets of Westminster most days. You see sleeping bags and tents creeping into more and more public places.

This follows a consistent pattern of shoving unsolvable social problems down to largely helpless councils

Under Theresa May, arrests and prosecutions under the Vagrancy Act plummeted, and fell to almost nothing during Covid, and have remained there since. In 2023, only 298 people were convicted under the Vagrancy Act, the typical penalty of which is a fine. With the repeal of the act, it is now being left to councils “to be proactive in addressing any behaviour which negatively impacts our local communities, including the most visible signs of rough sleeping such as tents and encampments.” 

This follows a consistent pattern of shoving unsolvable social problems down to largely helpless councils, which have no power to move people on. The 1977 housing act gave councils a statutory duty to prevent homelessness, yet in that time rough sleeping has only increased, and council house building has ground to a halt. Abandoning the policing of vagrancy and begging to councils risks repeating the same pattern of failed devolution, in which responsibilities are given without concomitant powers, guaranteeing disaster. 

Acute adult mental health services are run at 95 per cent capacity, with a massive shortage of beds. Residential treatment for addiction is mainly available via the private sector, with only a few thousand beds in the entire country. This situation is not some oversight, but simply the end of a very long tail of government policy that began with “deinstitutionalisation” in the 1960s. The number of available beds decreased in absolute terms by over 90 per cent in that period, as patients were moved to “care in the community”, as psychiatric hospitals were closed, and care was to be localised and provided to patients living independently or with family.

The aims were admirable, and a significant part of the reduction in residential care was driven by genuinely positive developments like effective drug treatment, greater independence and dignity for individuals with learning disabilities or mental health conditions, and more compassionate social attitudes to sufferers. 

But too much of the programme became a covert way of shifting a growing burden of mental ill health into a poorly resourced and badly organised world of local provision. This failed to support those most in distress, such as mentally ill rough sleepers, who would stand most to benefit from residential care, and are least able or willing to access support and shelter otherwise. It has also seen the burden of the mental health crisis shifted to acute services, or to other areas of public provision, like the wider NHS, schools, police, prisons and the welfare system, often at great and ongoing expense, with one report estimating that for every 100 places in psychiatric care lost, 36 more people end up in prison. 

Councils lack the resources or enforcement powers to fill this gap, and because other services remain nationalised, there is poor coordination between locally-based mental health care, and centrally run and administered services. Those who do try to access support often face long waiting lists. Civil society and the private and voluntary sector have a vital part to play, but with a largely nationalised system of health and care, and a much diminished civil society, Britain has to begin where infrastructure, capacity and expertise currently exists, with provision devolved evenly and across multiple areas, rather than dropped on disempowered and cash-strapped local councils. 

Time and time again the same story plays out. What looks like compassion all too often ends up being a lethal indifference to a problem that is degrading common life and abandoning the most damaged and troubled of our fellow citizens to a brutalised life on the streets. Failing to police vagrancy destroys a vital impetus to the most habitually homeless to access care and support, even as it undermines our social order and makes public spaces unpleasant and threatening. Closing down asylums, many of which were failing, overly punitive environments, felt like a good thing to do, but it closed off a form of support that many desperately needed, and avoided the harder road of gradual reform and evolution. 

What is needed instead is for homelessness to be resolved directly

We need a national strategy on homelessness, one that targets every aspect of the problem, and also gives due consideration to the right of the public to enjoy common spaces. At present, temporary accommodation and shelters do little to address the deep and complex problems of the homeless, simply warehousing them. Many of these shelters are based in commercial and cultural centres, multiplying the economic and social harms of homelessness. 

What is needed instead is for homelessness to be resolved directly. Where homeless people are capable of being responsible tenants, we should pursue a Housing First strategy, with the cost of a home an effective and lasting policy intervention that prevents expensive time in prisons and hospitals, and can produce transformative results. Where homeless people are too deep in addiction or mental ill health to live independently, we need to replace the role of shelters with residential addiction and mental health facilities, creating a treatment pathway to independent living and housing. Shelters and other temporary accommodation should instead function as referral centres, with targets to move residents quickly into housing or treatment. 

Britain has had far too much passing and repealing of laws in place of policy, and far, far too much of a false “compassion” that harms and kills.

Policing is a vital part of this picture. Those most in need of treatment are often those most resistant to seeking it, or incapable of doing so. The Vagrancy Act empowers the public to report begging and rough sleeping, and the police to intervene to respond to it. Fines and prosecution could be avoided for rough sleepers willing to engage with the new system, whilst begging by those in accommodation, or involved with criminal gangs, could be rightly suppressed by policing. In the case of foreign nationals, the law also gives police the opportunity to establish their immigration status, and refer their cases to immigration courts to determine. 

Britain has had far too much passing and repealing of laws in place of policy, and far, far too much of a false “compassion” that harms and kills. We will never address the evils of poverty and want if we abandon social order. We need true compassion from those in positions of power — a love that shelters and protects because it is armed with authority.