The barefoot czar steps out

She has been walking around in sandals for the last seven weeks and explains her feet have not yet readjusted to high heels.

This is Louise Casey's second day in her new role as the government's 'streets czar', heading the London Rough Sleepers' Unit, with its three-year, £145m budget.

She is ready for the fray. "I've just come back from two countries that are developing, where there isn't a social welfare system, where there isn't the option of jobs, and there are fewer beggars on the streets than there are here," she says of her recent trip to Mexico and Guatemala.

Casey is firm: sleeping on the streets can be too easy an option.

She recounts meeting two teenagers sleeping rough in central London. "They were having a great time on one level. They were begging during the day, they didn't want to sign on, they were making a reasonable living, and they were part of a community. One of their friends had been interviewed on telly. They thought it was quite glamorous."

"We've got to get the message out that those people have got to come in." Casey, 34, has a reputation as a straight-talker who can get things done. Previously deputy director of Shelter, she was responsible for implementing the charity's national telephone advice line, Shelterline. As director of Homeless Network, she co-ordinated the distribution of £96m Rough Sleepers Initiative cash in London, and organised a lobby which led to an extension of the Rough Sleepers Initiative. At St Mungos, she led and co-ordinated national sleepout week, the largest national appeal for single homeless people.

This is a woman who likes a challenge. The common concensus is that if anyone can meet the government's target to cut rough sleeping, she can.

But the idea of forcing people off the streets has raised hackles.

As Centrepoint chief executive Victor Adebowale says: "The target is one of the government's key social policy objectives. There's two ways we can achieve it. One is to sweep the streets of people, the other is to take a strategic approach and if they want a permanent solution, that's what they have to do."

The spectre of the streets being swept of the homeless, New York-style, was raised in the Social Exclusion Unit's report last July, when it said its explicit intention was to "deliver clear streets".

It went on: -The government believes that the public will feel they have a right to expect hostel places to be taken up as more become available ... If new powers are needed to ensure places are taken up, the government will reconsider the matter."

The idea of coercion set alarm bells ringing amongst homeless agencies: Casey was amongst the critics (Housing Today, issue 92).

Today she chooses her words carefully: "I'm not convinced bringing in coercion will work. We do have to give people on the streets every opportunity possible to come in off the streets. The quid pro quo is we expect that they will."

However, she goes on: "I said this when I was deputy director of Shelter, and I'm not saying this now simply because I'm working for the government, but I believe we have a real problem in this country, and particularly in the capital, with street culture being as strong as it is."

She wants to make it more difficult - but not illegal - for the teenagers she met to choose a life which appears to have little future beyond drug abuse, ill health and social exclusion.

She says: "I don't think we should allow that. I don't mean allow in a legal sense, I mean in a moral and compassionate sense. It's not right that that's all we offer those people."

She concedes that there is "a very small minority" who will not stop sleeping rough. She says: "For them we just have to provide a lifeline and some sort of care while they're out there. But I think those numbers are small."

Casey's first move will be to run a series of consultations with rough sleepers, partly to tell them about the government's target and partly to find out why they are still there. Casey feels that for all the surveys that have been done, there is still a piece of the jigsaw missing - despite ten years of the Rough Sleepers Initiative, there are still people sleeping on the streets.

She is already thinking about ideas presented to her last week by a group at The Passage day centre. We should hear more of a 24-hour crisis centre in London for homeless people; and separate centres for those with alcohol or drug problems.

Her immediate task is to recruit about 15 staff to the unit, including senior level civil servants from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the Department of Social Security and the Department of Health to work on policy.

Housing benefit and its administration will be at the top of their list, and their findings will feed into the government's national target. Casey knows all about benefits maladministration and delays from her time in the voluntary sector - and a spell working in a Brixton benefits office. She says: "I have met people who are now homeless because housing benefit hasn't paid out on time and they've been evicted."

Casey is thinking about the best way for different sectors to be involved.

She will be appealing to housing associations to provide move-on accommodation, but believes there is scope for them to do more.

"Its about providing a helping hand to some of the small agencies who frankly struggle." Larger associations would be ideally placed to offer support to smaller, understaffed homeless agencies, who struggle with an administrative burden while "trying to keep an outreach service going on the streets of central London, with possibly one admistrator and one finance officer.

"Housing associations wouldn't dream of operating that way once they got to a certain size."

Focused partnerships between those associations and agencies may be the way forward.

Casey says: "The whole way I'm approaching this job is that we've got to be incredibly focused. That means potentially some people might feel left out, it might mean that other people get a bigger role, I don't know yet. But focus is the word. It's not just about dealing with the 500 out there tonight, it's about preventing any more tomorrow. And that's a bloody big job, frankly."

While everyone else is firmly focused on 2002 as Casey's deadline, she is putting a little more pressure on herself - the Millennium. "I don't want anyone starting off 2000 sleeping in a cardboard box unless they really, really, really want to. I don't think as a country and a capital that we should have to. Six months down the road will be my first milestone."