Starting in 2010, homelessness in England began to rise. It wasn’t specific to any particular group. The numbers of people sleeping rough, the families with children, and the women and children who were fleeing domestic violence, all rose.
Some observers attribute the rise in homelessness to the hot real estate market and the government’s austerity budgets that followed the 2008 mortgage meltdown. The impacts of changes to the social safety net, particularly the introduction of Universal Credit, which replaced six social assistance programs, are well documented.1
Other observers assert that localism should be considered among the factors that drove the rise in homelessness.
Localism, as the name suggests, means shifting responsibility for public decisions away from national government. In this case, it is local councils that have new decision making powers. Localism is argued to allow local councils to
- nuance services to meet local needs,
- experiment with innovation,
- be accountable to the local community, and
- avoid the headaches of working around national program rules that make no sense.
Of course, it’s not all roses. Localism means that services will vary from one council area to another. This is a function of local priority making. In this instance, some local councils cut funding for some services that assisted vulnerable adults. There wasn’t a big political cost to cutting the funding for the council, but it had a huge impact on the people it helped. It also meant uneven service as some councils did help people who were sleeping rough, while others did not.
Localism also means that the capacity to deliver services varies. This could be especially significant when a council acquires new areas of decision making or responsibilities. Before localism, the national government was responsible for helping people who live with mental illness and/or addictions to maintain their tenancy. Even assuming a council decided to help, would it have access to people with the skills to do this kind of helping?
So localism can work to the detriment of vulnerable adults. The authors of the attached article make the case that localism does work to the detriment of people who are vulnerable. They argue that an individual with multiple vulnerabilities will experience more harm at the hands of localism than an individual with fewer vulnerabilities. They also argue that people who are most negatively affected by localism ought to be supported at the national level.
For more on the issue of localism, see at the London School of Economics : Localism and homelessness: a decade of disaster in England
Footnotes
- Here’s one example: Universal Credit = Less Housing Security
