By Isle of Wight Observer
Dear Editor,
The Vagrancy Act of 1824 referred to by Adam Webb in last week’s IW Observer, criminalised rough sleeping – something which Mr Webb, presumably, and I have never had to do; rough sleepers are homeless for any number of reasons, ranging from mental illness, releases from prison with nowhere to go, even the breakdown of relationships. These are misfortunes, not criminal acts – and one or other of them could happen to any of us.
Legislation enacted in 2014 provides local councils and police with powers to address vagrancy and begging, without hauling people before magistrates who can rarely do anything for them, other than pass them on to appropriate agencies: and if those worked, they wouldn’t have been homeless in the first place. Part of the problem, which criminalising people doesn’t begin to address, is the shortage of affordable housing and rented property, inadequate support in the community, and in some cases drug and alcohol addiction – when this leads to anti-social behaviour (and Mr Webb is right to observe that it often does); we have better ways than a 200-year-old piece of legislation to address it. Better ways, but still not good enough.
Your correspondents Messrs Webb and P Stannard have a bit of a fondness for ancient legislation, and superannuated party manifestos, but I can tell the latter that the Right to Buy as an idea wasn’t the problem: the way it was enacted was, since councils and housing associations, one of which I chaired for some years, were prevented by government at the time from investing the receipts in the provision of new housing, which is one reason, but not the only one, why we have a homelessness problem today.
Robert Jones, Niton