Cambridge cannot solve its homelessness crisis without addressing how councils are funded

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

Welcome as the new Cambridge Homelessness Charter is, the roots of the problem are embedded in how our city, county, and economic sub-region are governed. Changing this requires a change in the law. And for that to happen, it needs conversations with ministers

You can read the charter at https://cambridgehomelessnesscharter.org.uk/ – something that reminded me of this piece about the impact of our housing and cost of living crises on young people, and on loneliness in society too.

“But this isn’t about central government. This is about local action”

“Today Cambridge is recognised as being a very unequal city, with issues concerning homelessness high on the agenda. The Charter’s aim is to work with local priorities to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.”

Above – introduction to the Cambridge Homelessness Charter

The pillars of the charter

It’s not simply about fundraising. Eglantyne Jebb – founder of Save the Children told Cambridge residents this back in July 1910 when she was a prominent activist for the Cambridge Liberal Party.

“I was a long time realising that the social reform on the part of the Conservatives is like charity in the hands of a Lady Bountiful – everything to be made nice and pleasant, but the ‘upper class’ is to be respected and obeyed. The corruption of elections first opened my eyes and I came to believe that no social reform could be of use that did not promote the independence of the people.”

Above – Eglantyne Jebb quoted in the Cambridge Independent Press 08 July 2010 via Lost Cambridge

Above – Eglantyne Jebb (Palmer Clark Archive) in the Cambridgeshire Collection (go and visit them for more historical gems) circa early 1900s

Which reminds me – I need to refresh some of the older blogposts I have about her.

The reason why Eglantyne Jebb matters is because she knew more about Cambridge’s housing crisis than almost anyone in the town at the time. She researched and wrote the epic Cambridge: A brief study in social questions in 1906 – a book that opened my eyes to a world of the women who made modern Cambridge before being subsequently forgotten by everyone until recently. My own research builds on the work that author Clare Mulley undertook in her research on Eglantyne, which you can read about in her blog here.

With my own situation technically I’m part of the hidden homeless – someone who boomeranged back to their childhood home but would rather have a place of their own. Chronic illness and declining health since leaving the civil service has meant that the vision/dream some of us 1990s teenagers were sold would remain just that. A dream. But I’m one of the fortunate ones in having family local to me to fall back on. Hence doing mainly one-off things such as tabling public questions on homelessness following a workshop I ran at Winter Comfort in 2015, through to filming at events raising awareness, such as the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at Great St Mary’s in 2017.

Too many of our fellow residents are not so fortunate – and given the wealth generated within our city/city region, it should not be like this.

…Hence the charter.

The pillars of the charter – again

They are:

  • Data – knowing what is needed and what works, including upstream measures
  • Information – keeping everyone informed on actions, progress and how to help
  • Housing – ensuring sufficient emergency, temporary, supported and permanent housing
  • Support – building trust and collaboration in wrap-around support
  • Health – ensuring sufficient health services and eliminating barriers to accessing these services
  • Employment – providing job opportunities, careers advice and training

There are a host of challenges to overcome. Taking health as an example, recall all of those red risks on Addenbrooke’s corporate risk register? If they cannot solve their red risks then that’s already one pillar that has crumbled into dust.

Homelessness is a political issue.

We cannot pretend that such a complex social issue as homelessness can be solved by well-minded business-and-charity people alone.

“Why in the world would *anyone* want to get involved in politics given how toxic that world is?!?”

Therein resides the problem – perhaps the biggest one of all. The highly-centralised political and governance structures we have in England means that anyone wanting to achieve a collective social progress at scale is going to have to engage with an institution of the state at some stage. Even registering a charity involves engaging with the sector’s regulator, The Charity Commission.

Furthermore we have to acknowledge that there will be individuals and interests that will be against anyone doing anything more than providing charitable donations to alleviate the symptoms of the issue because long term solutions affect their interests. Look at every planning application for housing in a place with a housing shortage and you will find examples of developers using every tool in the box to reduce the amount of social and affordable housing they have to provide. Look at how wealthy property interests lobby both development planning processes and lobby ministers on easing regulations that may reduce their overall profits. The Grenfell Inquiry went some way to exposing the huge failures over decades across multiple sectors and institutions, and helping make the case for much firmer, more effective regulation of the housing and construction industries especially where there are strong short-term monetary incentives to cut corners and breach legal duties and ethical standards.

Big Issue founder John Bird vs the think tank bubble

I sometimes wonder what I would have done had my health not imploded in the early 2010s shortly after I took voluntary redundancy in 2011 from the civil service. Would I have ended up in local government? A Westminster think tank? Academia? Would I have moved abroad permanently? In one sense I could have become my own worst nightmare – the sort of figure that was the 21st Century equivalent of the Lady Bountiful that Eglantyne Jebb scorned over a century ago.

“While once again on the streets of Westminster, a minute or two from the Houses of Parliament, I was asked about Finland. I looked at the man, an intelligent man who works for various think tanks and prides himself on his thinking. Take his thinking away from him and you deprive him of his means of making a good living. “

John Bird, The Big Issue 05 Oct 2023

Upon reading that I was like: “That could have been me! Eww!”

And not surprisingly when said policy-wonk starting talking about solutions to a homelessness crisis that he’d not experienced himself (mentioning Finland in the process), John Bird subsequently gave the former a history lesson. Which is striking given that since leaving the civil service and since the EU Referendum I’ve probably spent more time on history-related things than national public policy things.

“It might be slightly different cleansing the streets of downtown Helsinki of homeless people – Helsinki, capital of Finland, with its mindset not formed from hundreds of years of self-inflicted suffering. Don’t you think?”

John Bird, The Big Issue 05 Oct 2023

It’s easy to forget in the current TeamNigel-dominated media climate that London has been a global capital for centuries due to that violent mix of wars and commerce. The modern day civil service with its values are quite literally the product of colonialism and empire – as I found out accidentally several years ago.

And just as the creation of the modern civil service upended the way the UK was governed, so it feels like we are entering an era where the way our towns and cities are governed are moving into a new era. Have a look at the reports from the Re:State think tank, and the New Local think tank. (That does not mean ‘copy and paste’ to your locality – as Lord Bird states, you cannot simply take a model from one place and dump it on another and expect it to work splendidly).

The crunch conversation:

For me, this is one of the important questions we need to answer:

***What are the powers [legal & financial] and resources that the new unitary council for Cambridge will need to lead efforts on eradicating homelessness in our communities?***

That in itself may lead to further questions such as:

“What are the things that local government would like to do to help eradicate homelessness in our communities, but is not able to do? Why not? Who are the people/institutions preventing/stopping it from doing so?”

Some of you may be surprised at how quickly your line of questioning leads back to the institutions of central government. Which means that in order to come up with meaningful and sustainable solutions, there needs to be a change in government policy and quite possibly a change in the law to facilitate this.

If there’s one thing I recommend for the signatories of the charter, it is to come up with a comprehensive and coherent set of requests of central government, setting out what impact that delivering on those requests would have.

Furthermore, if the net result of those requests does not enable the new local government institutions for Cambridge to tax more of the wealth being generated here to invest in/maintain the infrastructure needed for a sustainable future for all of us, then we will need to think again before approaching ministers.

No one said this was going to be quick or easy. Public policy by its very nature is fiendishly complex.

Food for thought?

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: