Why Starmer's homelessness reform could see Britain overrun by rough sleepers

Telegraph

a day ago

The 'tent city' on Park Lane, in the central reservation near Hyde Park Corner, comprises 23 tents, tables, office chairs, shopping trolleys and washing lines. A neatly stacked pile of bin bags lies to one side while Lime bikes have been discarded around the settlement.
A handful of large white signs are stacked up, reading: 'I'm hungry, God bless.'
Those living here suggest there is little difference between their circumstances and those of the thousands of rough sleepers across the country, who will be decriminalised under plans announced by Sir Keir Starmer this week.
To tourists, residents and those working in the surrounding Mayfair streets, however, the scene might more aptly be described as illegal camping.
'It's not good at all, but we don't have a permanent place where we can wait for approval from City Hall [for housing],' says Mihai, 54, from Romania, the only inhabitant prepared to speak to The Telegraph, who refuses to give his surname. 'Would you like to live here?'
He says he has lived at the site for two years, has indefinite leave to remain in the UK and works as a cleaner. He has also camped at Marble Arch and in Hyde Park. There were more people in the camp previously, he says, but they have gradually been found housing.
A mile to the east, at Tottenham Court Road, Mel, 60, who also refuses to give his surname, lives in another encampment with his nephews Danny, 27, and Liam, 22, and their dogs, Cain and Sierra. Mel was born in west London and says he used to have three full-time jobs – in sales and advertising, as an estate agent and as a supervisor at a bowling alley – but has been living on the street for six years since he was kicked out of his council house over a dispute with a neighbour.
'It's not a choice for me living on the street,' he says. 'If it was, I wouldn't have been here for nearly seven years now.'
He adds that Romanian migrants are more comfortable living this way.
'People from other places have a tent mentality,' he says. 'What bugs me is we're a first-world country, and these people don't have the understanding that when you come to a better country, you have to make yourself better. You can't just stand on the corner drinking beer and whistling at women. It's easy for them because they grew up in desolate countries.'
The situation in central London encapsulates the complexity of legislating around homelessness. On Tuesday, the Government announced plans to decriminalise rough sleeping, continuing a Tory proposal from 2022 to repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act. The Bill was originally brought in to deal with rising homelessness after the Napoleonic Wars and has long been considered out of date, with references to 'vagabonds' and 'rogues'.
'We are drawing a line under nearly two centuries of injustice towards some of the most vulnerable in society, who deserve dignity and support,' said Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister. 'No one should ever be criminalised simply for sleeping rough and, by scrapping this cruel and outdated law, we are making sure that can never happen again.'
To ensure the police still have authority to combat antisocial behaviour, the Government promised to create new offences, including facilitating begging for gain and trespassing with the intention of committing a crime, both of which were previously included under the 1824 Act. Experts warn legislation against begging may yet rub up against the European Convention on Human Rights; in 2021, the court ruled that Switzerland had violated human rights when it fined a woman who had been begging.
Homelessness is a global issue, of course, and there is a huge range of government responses to it. While Britain is moving to decriminalise rough sleeping, America has gone in the other direction. Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that punishing rough sleepers was not a 'cruel and unusual punishment,', as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Homelessness has become a pressing problem in several American cities, most notoriously San Francisco. An estimated 771,000 Americans were homeless last year, more than any year on record.
Since the ruling, at least 163 municipalities have passed rules banning camping. There are signs that policy is working. Last year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, promised 'no more excuses' for the state with the highest 'unsheltered' rate in the country. Since encampments began to be cleared after the Supreme Court ruling, California's rate has stabilised. While, nationwide, homelessness increased by 18 per cent, in California it rose by just 3 per cent.
In Fresno, California, members of the public can now report camps via an app. Rough sleepers could face fines of up to $1,000 or a year in prison, or they can ask to be taken to a shelter to discuss treatment or housing.
When asked about whether the new rules were simply moving homeless people out of sight, Jerry Dyer, the city's Republican mayor and its former police chief, recently told The Economist: 'I'm sure there are people that have now chosen places that are less visible publicly, which is not a bad thing.'
Some fear that the relaxing of rules in the UK will lead to the proliferation of rough sleeping seen in California prior to last year's Supreme Court ruling, in which Park Lane-style encampments spread across the country.
'San Francisco is the worst example but loads of these Left-wing-run cities in America have taken an approach of non-enforcement of laws around rough sleeping and petty crime,' says Fred de Fossard, the strategy director of the Prosperity Institute and a former Tory special adviser at the Cabinet Office, highlighting the absurdity of the UK taking such an approach when the United States is tacking in the opposite direction.
'Repealing the Vagrancy Act paves the way for [American levels of rough sleeping] here. This, in turn, will lead to a clamp-down in the future that will be 'more authoritarian than people are comfortable with and it will be entirely avoidable because we have taken a misguided, short-termist approach to these laws. This will fortify these encampments and make it harder for police to get rid of genuine criminals.'
Certainly, those in charge of clearing encampments such as the one at Park Lane may wish police had similar powers to their US counterparts. The problem has been rumbling on for years. Last month, a court granted Transport for London (TfL), which owns the land, a possession order to remove the camp on Park Lane. A TfL spokesman said: 'We had to take enforcement action to regain possession of the site on two occasions last year; however, a number of people have returned with tents and other belongings.'
David Spencer, the head of crime and justice at Policy Exchange, a think tank, and a former Met Police officer, says the situation at Park Lane encapsulates the difficulties facing those trying to disperse groups of rough sleepers, and the risks of removing their powers.
'Aggressive begging, rough sleeping and associated antisocial behaviour are things residents bring up all the time with the police,' he says. 'The reality is that they are issues which the police and local authorities are not able or willing to get to grips with. The police would never look at arrest and prosecution in the first instance, but what the Government is doing is removing the backstop, taking away almost any power the police has to deal with it.
'What we risk is a constant slide towards the degradation of our public realm, with government, police, authorities seeming to take a more permissive attitude to things like graffiti, begging, rough sleeping, fare dodging, which come up all the time with law-abiding people going about their lives,' he adds. 'People are sympathetic to those who find themselves in these situations, but we risk taking away the backstop that lets authorities do something about it. If we look at Park Lane, things have really got out of control.
While some rough sleepers in central London beg, others manage to work, often in marginal gig-economy employment as delivery drivers or kitchen porters. Others choose to leave offered accommodation altogether. In June 2023, dozens of asylum seekers camped outside the accommodation they were offered in Pimlico, having balked at the prospect of sleeping four to a room. Signs by their camp read: 'This is a prison, not a hotel.'
The Home Office stated that the accommodation was offered on a 'no-choice basis' and met 'all legal and contractual requirements.' In May 2024, Sadiq Khan pledged to end rough sleeping by 2030, and secured £17 million in central funding to do so. But if dealing with homeless people who want to find accommodation is difficult enough, what to do about those who – like the asylum seekers in Pimlico – prefer to sleep outside?
Rough sleeping is only the most visible form of homelessness, which can also include living in temporary accommodation, sofa-surfing – sometimes called 'hidden homelessness' – and statutory homelessness, where a tenant has been served an eviction notice. The nature of rough sleeping can be difficult to quantify. According to the Ministry of Housing, which collates estimates from local authorities, there are around 2,000 rough sleepers in London, a figure that has more than doubled since the pandemic. Its data show that in that period, rough sleeping has risen across the country, in some areas by many multiples, including 1050 per cent in Charnwood, Leicestershire.
Other sources put the figures much higher. According to the homelessness charity St Mungo's, there were 4,427 people recorded rough sleeping in London in the first quarter of 2025, an increase of 8 per cent on the same period last year.
'More people are becoming homeless and people are staying homeless for longer,' says Sean Palmer, the executive director of strategy and transformation at St Mungo's. 'It's getting more difficult to move people off of the streets, because there's not a supply of social housing, there's a block at the end of the system.'
Rough sleeping has already been in effect decriminalised, with only five people sentenced for 'sleeping out' in England and Wales since 2017. Begging prosecutions have also fallen: the 160 sentences handed down for begging in 2024 was the lowest annual total on record, less than a fifth of the series high in 2018. But Palmer says the law can still have a deterrent effect on people seeking help:
'The Act as it is now isn't good for our clients, people suffering from homelessness and people rough sleeping. Sometimes it encourages them to hide more because they don't want to be criminalised and are less likely to receive the help and support they need to resolve their homelessness.'
He says Mungo's clients come from a wide range of situations. 'It could be problems with the housing market, problems with money. A lot of people are bouncing around insecure accommodation and eventually they run out of goodwill and end up on the streets. Often our clients have backgrounds in the care system, sometimes in the military. Often people are leaving a government institution – they might be discharged from hospital, or be being moved on from the asylum system, or they might have left prison.
'I can't see how criminalising someone is helpful. We see the numbers of people coming out of the criminal justice system into homelessness. Feeding them back into the criminal justice system for being homeless, or feeding people who are homeless for other reasons back into the justice system, seems entirely counterproductive.'
Proposed new offences target aggressive beggars and gangs, rather than individuals. The cautionary example of the US, however, shows what can happen when authorities have insufficient powers to disperse rough sleepers.
The knottier issue at the heart of legislation is that many people don't think camping ought to be illegal and have great sympathy for those who find themselves homeless, even if they object to the sight of tent cities in some of London's most prestigious areas. The legal fudges reflect this Nimbyism. It also means that as a political issue, rough sleeping will not be moving along any time soon.