Rough Sleepers Initiative - Rough Sleepers Unit (RSU)

Rough Sleepers Unit (RSU)

By 1997 the incoming Labour government wanted a different and more effective approach to dealing with rough sleeping. It created the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), situated within the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, to prioritise the key social issues to be tackled by the new administration. Rough sleeping was selected as a high priority and the RSU was created, headed up by a high profile and plain-speaking ‘homelessness tsar’ called Louise Casey.

The RSU was tasked with reducing rough sleeping across England by two-thirds within a three-year time frame. As the programme was late to start, this was in the end compressed into a period of slightly over two years. The practical and ideological approach of the RSU differed markedly from the RSI. Notably:

• The head of the RSU, Louise Casey led the programme on a very ‘hands on’ basis, routinely going onto the street herself with her team, directly making referrals into hostels and tracking rough sleepers with the explicit objective of ‘shaking up’ the system where she perceived it to be failing. Her team comprised career civil servants and also an array of individuals hand-picked from the voluntary sector to work with her.

• The approach required from outreach teams was different, with teams expected to be more assertive in their approach to rough sleepers. The approach from staff to rough sleepers changed from one characterised by ‘working with you at your own pace’ to the more direct ‘why are you here and what do you need to help you get off the street?’

The RSU funding approach was also different in the following ways:

• Outreach teams continued to be funded, now known as Contact and Assessment Teams (CATS), as an important element of the programme but the number of teams was reduced to avoid duplication and to give greater ownership of geographical areas in central London.

• Resettlement teams were reshaped into six Tenancy Sustainment Teams (TSTs) operating on a geographical basis, with the task of sustaining former rough sleepers in self-contained accommodation and with no time limit imposed concerning the length of time over which support could be offered.

• The RSU concentrated on providing additional resources to frontline hostels, rather than on funding a large flat-building programme. Through its financial investment in hostels the RSU was able to ring-fence bed-spaces in the hostels for rough sleepers, so increasing the throughput of people coming in off the streets. It also funded specialist bed-spaces for people with drug and alcohol problems.

• Night centres were funded in London, Bristol and Manchester to provide easy access off the streets and an inviting environment for rough sleepers who were unwilling to take up a hostel bed or were banned from hostels.

• A series of temporary (‘rolling’) shelters were funded to provide basic emergency, short-stay accommodation for rough sleepers as a replacement for the seasonal winter shelter programme.

• The consortium model was re-shaped to be more streamlined and focused with fewer partners, less bureaucracy and stronger leadership required from local authorities.

• More attention was given to tracking rough sleepers through the hostel system and to sharing information between partner organisations via a central database called ‘Chain’.

• A stronger role was given to the police with additional funding coming from central government to fund the Safer Streets Police Team to work with street users (not just entrenched rough sleepers but street drinkers, people begging on the street, new arrivals to the street etc.).

• Attention was given to tackling what were seen as the magnets drawing people back into street homelessness, including street begging and soup runs provided by faith groups. For example, the RSU ran a high-profile campaign aimed at discouraging the public from giving money to people begging on the street.

The RSU phase came to an end in 2002 following the successful reduction by 70% of rough sleeping across England, so achieving the Prime Minister’s target of a two-thirds reduction. In London the reduction was more modest and the two-thirds reduction target was not met.

The following factors led to the RSU being successful:

• The high–profile leadership given by the Head of the RSU linked with the importance given to the reduction in rough sleeping by the Prime Minister Tony Blair had a galvanising effect and created considerable momentum.

• The direct approach taken by the RSU coupled with a more assertive outreach approach successfully reduced the numbers of rough sleepers at key central London ‘hotspots’. Where before rough sleepers congregated in groups of up to 100, by 2001 it was rare to see a hotspot containing more than a dozen rough sleepers.

• The exclusive allocation of bed-spaces to rough sleepers in key frontline hostels created the ‘flow-through’ from the streets required to achieve the target.

• Investment in outreach teams and hostels in cities outside London such as Birmingham and York where there had been little investment previously led to a dramatic drop in numbers sleeping rough.

• The TSTs proved more successful that their predecessors in sustaining former rough sleepers in tenancies with the eviction and abandonment rates plummeting from almost 20% of tenants leaving accommodation within one year of a tenancy starting to under 5%.

• The relationships between the voluntary sector organisations and the police became formalised and more effective and were characterised by a more integrated approach, rather than the different bodies working in parallel. This was illustrated in practical terms through the creation of a regular meeting involving police, local authority representatives and voluntary sector agencies at which information on rough sleepers was shared. Where appropriate and beneficial, joint street-work was undertaken.

There were criticisms of the RSU’s approach from a number of quarters and its successes were not unqualified. In particular:

• Some charities expressed severe misgivings at the assertive approach encouraged by the RSU and believed it to be too aggressive, disrespectful to rough sleepers and counter-productive. They also challenged the veracity of street counts which were increasingly perceived as intended to produce a low figure on an allotted night, rather than being a genuine reflection of the number of rough sleepers.

• The RSU concentrated on making the street count figure the headline outcome figure, giving less prominence to the fact that the numbers of rough sleepers sleeping out over a year in central London was approximately ten times the number of people sleeping rough on any single night.

• Although numbers on the streets went down, central London hostels were soon full to over-flowing with rough sleepers, many of whom had multiple needs. Critics claimed that people were being ‘warehoused’ in hostels rather than being helped to find long-term, settled accommodation.

• In London the reduction in rough sleeping was less than elsewhere in the country and in the central London borough of Westminster where over 100 people continued to sleep rough on any one night, the problem appeared particularly intractable.