My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak to this group of amendments. I declare my interest as chair of Look Ahead, a housing association that specialises in working with people with complex needs. I am delighted by the Government’s new amendments in this area—I believe that they go a long way—but I am disappointed that housing appears to have been omitted from the government amendments.
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Amendment 65, which adds housing to this section, is one that I would particularly want to support. I want to take a phrase from my noble friend Lord Crisp: health—and here I would add, “including mental health”—is made at home. However, if you do not have a home, you cannot make physical or mental health. Driving in this morning because of the Tube strike, listening to “Woman’s Hour”, which I do not always manage to do, I heard a dramatic example of somebody who has fled domestic abuse and been temporarily rehoused by the council, but has no white goods. She is diabetic, so her insulin is out of control because she cannot keep it cold. What a straightforward example of how housing and simple equipment can facilitate good health.
Another example is where we discharge people to safe accommodation, where they have the opportunity for rehabilitation or to cope with a long-term disability that may have occurred as a result of an accident. This requires sheltered and semi-independent living accommodation to be built. If those issues are carefully considered by our new boards, together with housing locally, we will find a way forward, to reduce the distress of significant illness and domestic violence, to enable young people in family breakdown to move to bedsits rather than to the streets, and to make care leavers feel safe—as well as older people then knowing that there is somewhere that they can move to. We know that those with significant incomes are increasingly
moving, because they can fund themselves, to sheltered accommodation, which reduces loneliness and gives all sorts of advantages in later life.
I again thank the Government and remind them that, tragically, the average age of death of people experiencing homelessness remains at 46 years for a man and 43 years for a woman.