St Valentine is widely thought to have been a clergyman who ministered to persecuted Christians, who became the patron saint of love. Love affects all of us in one way or another; we give and we receive. Scrolling through the internet, looking for information about St Valentine, I am drawn to an initiative in the USA which believes that children can, at a young age, develop compassion for others less fortunate by learning about people who are homeless. The idea is that schools and their students can make up boxes with needed essentials and handwritten Valentine cards for homeless people in their community. Through this, they send messages of hope and love to homeless people.
Whether one agrees with this sort of initiative or not, people who are homeless or rough sleeping need our help and compassion. But it has to be more than handing out food, sleeping bags or tents. We need to ensure that people get the help they need to prevent homelessness in the first place and this requires not just government funding, strategy and policy but also local authorities working in partnership with the NHS, police, probation, local homeless organisations and so on.
Over the first few weeks as your MP, I have met with the Minister of State for Homelessness, Luke Hall, various organisations including Hastings Furniture Store, Emmaus, Shelter, the Albert Kennedy Trust, St Mungo’s and Homeless Link to understand more about the issues surrounding homelessness and how we can end it. I have also joined the All Party Parliamentary Group for Homelessness, which aims to bring homelessness to the forefront of the parliamentary agenda, to ensure that ‘homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurrent’.
It is clear that the best way to tackle homelessness is to stop it happening in the first place. Homelessness and rough sleeping are caused by multiple issues, but there are known predictable routes into homelessness, like leaving prison or the care system. Here, we should be able to help people find and keep a home. Whilst preventing homelessness is cost-effective in the long term, it is fundamentally the right thing to do.
The Government’s Homelessness Reduction Act, which requires local authorities to focus on homelessness prevention, has been successful in many local authority areas, including Rother, but in Hastings, we do not see a reduction in homelessness and rough sleeping, despite the millions of pounds of funding Hastings Borough Council has received from the Government to end homelessness and rough sleeping in our town.
In the next year alone the Conservatives in central Government will be providing Hastings Borough Council with nearly an additional £1million to reduce homelessness. I have been inspired by local organisations fighting this scourge, but I recognise now that they are being woefully let down by the Labour run Council, whose leadership have not got a grip on this issue. Even with millions of pounds worth of central Government funding to tackle homelessness we still see the numbers rise to 48 people now sleeping rough on our streets.
I am appalled at the lack of action and determination from the leadership of the Labour Council to deal with this. The time for petty arguments and mudslinging must end. It is surely time we all come together and get a grip of this issue and once and for all eradicate homelessness and rough sleeping from Hastings.
In the coming weeks I will seek to take firm action and convene all involved groups to come together, to work together, and to step up our action and determination to deal with this issue.
As a community, we can and must come together, in a spirit of love and compassion to support and help those most in need, and to seek to find ways to prevent anyone else falling into homelessness and destitution. I know that as a town we have the capacity and will to do this, and we must harness this now before it is too late.
Sally-Ann Hart MP