My Lords, this is a very welcome Bill. It gives me great pleasure to support it, and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Best on introducing it so ably to your Lordships’ House.
Some nine years ago I was at a small seminar at Lancaster House, chaired by the then British Foreign Secretary and the American Secretary of State, in preparation for a joint visit that they were about to make to Afghanistan. I was asked on that occasion to introduce and lead a discussion on the aspirations of Afghan civilians. Of course I had to start by saying it was not for me to speak for Afghans; I did not live in their country, I was not of their religion and I came from a very different cultural background. However, I continued, many years of experience in diverse parts of the world had persuaded me that the desire for certain basic needs was common to the great majority around the globe, whatever their location, history or circumstances. First, they wished to be secure in their persons and their property. They wanted assurance that their lives, their well-being and the possessions they had accumulated, no matter how meagre they might be, would not be ripped from them by predators.
But second only to this, and pertinent to our debate today, they wanted to be able to provide a roof for their heads, a fire for the hearth and food for the table—a roof for their heads, my Lords.
In that meeting, we were discussing the pressing needs of the people who were part of a society that was in many ways still medieval and was riven by decades of war. It was perhaps unsurprising that home and hearth were such fragile aspirations for them. How much more embarrassing, then, that here in the UK, in the 21st century, we have so many citizens who face a similar plight?
No human society can ever be perfect, and I doubt whether we will ever reach the stage when we have totally eliminated poverty and homelessness, but it is surely our duty to maintain the struggle, to continue to reach for perfection, even if we know it will continue to elude us. The Bill does exactly that. It will not eliminate homelessness, as is apparent from its very title, the Homelessness Reduction Bill. It will advance the struggle, it will make practical changes that will have a real impact on this terrible problem. It will, crucially, put prevention at the forefront of our efforts to tackle the issue—and who can doubt that pre-emption is so much to be preferred over treatment? But where pre-emption fails and people are left homeless, the Bill extends the duty of care beyond the narrowly defined group that is perceived to be hardest hit and brings so many more within the ambit of local authority assistance.
These are important improvements to the current position and seem to me more than ample reason to support the Bill, but I have a narrower, more personal motive for speaking in its behalf. The homeless in our nation are not, as some might imagine, simply people from the fringes of society who contribute little, who are somehow inadequate and whom we should help just out of some sense of condescending charity. They have fallen on hard times for all sorts of reasons and they come from diverse situations and backgrounds. Among them, I regret to say, are veterans of the UK Armed Forces. I am encouraged to see that the number of these ex-military homeless has fallen in recent years, not least because the Ministry of Defence and the service charities have put a great deal of effort into addressing their plight, which in itself goes to show that more effective action can yield results, but they nevertheless exist. They are not, in the main, homeless because of their experiences in the military. A small number suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many more suffer from wider mental health problems, but the factors that have driven them to their current situation are, by and large, the same as those that affect the wider population. In that sense, they are no different from their fellow sufferers.
How ought we as a society to respond to such a situation? How ought we to feel when some of those who have served their country, often in the most difficult and dangerous conditions, are being allowed to languish on our streets without a roof to their heads? Ought we not to say to ourselves, “We cannot allow this to continue—not just common humanity but our own sense of obligation commands us to act”? Of course we should. I therefore welcome the Bill’s specific acknowledgement of this particular group.
I do not mean by this to suggest that the homeless who have no military background are somehow less deserving. They all have their stories, they all suffer, they all deserve our help. My point is that the presence of veterans among their number demonstrates clearly that this is not a problem afflicting others, it is a problem afflicting all of us. It adds yet more weight to the urgency of the challenge and the need to address it with ever more vigour. The Bill is a valuable and very welcome step forward in that regard, and it has my full support.
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