Cutting crime and homelessness

Housing offenders and those with criminal records has never been a popular cause. Yet recent developments suggest that a more rational approach to the housing of such groups, while recognising the problems they sometimes generate, is in the offing.

In a parliamentary answer to Hilary Benn MP, on November 8, Home Office minister Charles Clarke said that new guidance from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions would when emphasise that when exclusions from housing were being considered 'on the grounds of the need to protect the community or reduce levels of crime on an estate should be taken in consultation with relevant organisations in the criminal justice system, in particular the police and probation services.' Such consultation is important if all agencies, including housing, are to fulfil their responsibilities under Section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act to improve community safety. There is now a real chance that the new guidance will state that exclusions should be based on an assessment of an individual's history and the potential disruption that they pose to the community, rather than because they because they belong to a particular category, such as offenders.

The current dilemmas around the role of social housing in stabilising communities make decisions over allocation very difficult. Nevertheless, local allocations policies which simply displace offenders to other tenures or other communities do not enhance community safety as a whole.

There is legitimate public concern about the housing of offenders, and in particular sex offenders, which at the extreme end has its own community safety implications. The problem was highlighted recently when a woman from Swansea received 40 hours of community service for putting up a poster describing a resident on the estate where she lived as a 'pervert, flasher and paedophile' and calling for him to be evicted. The fact that the offender, who had been convicted of indecently exposing himself to children, had received a conditional discharge - a lesser punishment than community service - was grist to the mill for the tabloids, who predictably went to town on the story. 'Mad justice' screamed one headline. Yet without stable housing sex offenders are harder to supervise and more likely to go to ground, increasing risk to the public.

One response has been to threaten sanctions on tenants who commit offences, even if those offences were not committed in the area. Housing Today reported only a few weeks ago on such a scheme in south Birmingham (Housing Today, 21 October). Other responses have seen the imposition of blanket ban. A particularly extreme example was cited in Shelter's 1998 report Access Denied the report of a questionnaire survey of local authority housing departments:

'One authority in the North East excludes all offenders for "as long as the rehabilitation period is in force" and goes on to note that sentences exceeding two and a half years can never be spent and therefore these persons can be permanently excluded from the register.'

The danger of such approaches is that in trying to solve a problem, it simply makes it worse. As NACRO's new report - Going Straight Home - makes clear, the links between homelessness or unstable accommodation are well known. Homelessness may make it more difficult to avoid offending behaviour, and prisoners are more likely to reoffend if they have no home to go to on release.

Over the last three decades surveys and research studies have reinforced this message. Recent examples include a 1997 survey by the Prisons Inspectorate which found that a quarter of young prisoners were homeless on reception; a 1998 NACRO research study of juveniles in young offender institutions, 60 per cent of whom had unstable living conditions; and the Social Exclusion Unit's finding in the same year that half of rough sleepers had at some time been in a prison or remand centre.

Prisoners released homeless are much more likely to reoffend. One Home Office research study which followed up nearly 600 men for two years after release found that less than a third of those with homes to go to were reconvicted compared with 69 per cent of those with no home. On best estimates 600-800 released prisoners face homelessness every week, so the problem can hardly be said to be a small one.

The Government is taking a number of steps which should help in tackling the problem. These include legislation to improve support arrangements for care leavers, guidance to discourage `blanket bans' on offenders in housing allocation policies and a new key performance indicator for the prison and probation services related to reducing offenders' homelessness.

We also need higher levels of housing investment to increase the stock of affordable rented housing; a statutory duty on local authorities to provide resettlement services (in addition to advice and assistance) for homeless people; national standards and monitoring to ensure that the housing needs of marginalised groups including ex-offenders are properly met in social housing; a speeding up of housing benefit payments; and a reversal of restrictions which have reduced benefit payments below real rent levels in many areas.

Prisons should routinely provide housing advice on reception, help prisoners make arrangements to keep their existing accommodation, develop contacts with housing providers and make systematic plans for housing on release. Housing departments should nominate prison liaison personnel and commence homelessness assessments before the four week period prior to release.

The message is clear - when housing and criminal justice agencies work together to cut homelessness, they are also working to cut crime.