Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee

Review of Redundant and Unclear Legislation
Review of the Vagrancy Act 1966

Transcript of Evidence - 13 February 2002

Committee Members:
The Hon. C.A. Strong MLC (Chairman)
Mrs E.J. Beattie MLA
Mr C. Carli MP
The Hon. R.R.C. Maclellan MLA
The Hon. A.P. Olexander MLC

Staff:
Mr Andrew Homer, Senior Legal Adviser
Mr Simon Dinsbergs, Assistant Executive Officer

Witness:
The Hon. C.A. Strong MLC, Chairman, Redundant Legislation Subcommittee,
Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee

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The Hon. C.A. Strong MLC
Chairman, Redundant Legislation Subcommittee
Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee

The ACTING CHAIRMAN (Mr Olexander) — I welcome the Honourable Chris Strong as a witness. As is evident, a transcript will be prepared by Hansard. Would you like to make an initial statement at the commencement of your evidence?

Mr STRONG — I would, thank you, Mr Acting Chairman. Perhaps I should start by giving the background to my recent overseas study tour on which I want to report.

This was in fact intended to be a subcommittee tour to look at two specific jurisdictions, one in the United Kingdom with a Vagrancy Act very similar to our own and the other in Italy, which also has a very significant problem in the vagrancy area. For various reasons there were delays in bringing this to fruition. Nevertheless the subcommittee did resolve to have overseas travel to the UK and Italy to look at the issue of vagrancy. It set certain objectives for that proposed trip, which were communicated on 15 December to the Speaker, together with a formal request for a subcommittee tour.

Those objectives were, firstly, to investigate the nature of vagrancy causes — drugs, unemployment, poverty, housing shortages, youth issues; secondly, to compare and contrast the various national and local government models and approaches to vagrancy and related issues; thirdly, to review and understand the structure and effect of laws and regulations related to vagrancy and associated issues; and fourthly, to understand governmental responses to vagrancy, legal penalties, sanctions, emergency housing, public housing, and the role of charitable institutions.

As I said, the request for a subcommittee mission was sent to the Speaker. The Speaker responded on 17 December that in his view there was insufficient time to arrange such a mission, to run it through the organs of government and get approval from the Premier, et cetera, and in essence, therefore, concluded that he could not grant the request for overseas travel.

However, the problem was that on the basis of the earlier resolutions of the subcommittee the process had commenced of making appointments in both London and Rome. They were fairly well advanced by the end of December and therefore it was a question of whether they all be cancelled, at some embarrassment to the people overseas who had done it all, or we go ahead. As a consequence of that I decided to continue with the UK leg of the proposed subcommittee trip, where a lot of very interesting appointments had been made, and had to cancel the Rome part of the trip where various appointments had also been made. That introduction is an explanation that although it was a personal trip it was presented as an inquiry by this subcommittee.

I will deal with some of the key issues which I consider relevant to be put on the record so that they can be used by the subcommittee in its deliberations. The main areas of similarity in the UK act deal with the question of what they call ‘rough sleepers’, who are the street homeless people, and begging. As a consequence, probably most of my report will deal with the two issues of rough sleepers and begging. Both have been very significant problems in the UK. Certainly over the past five or six years a lot of people have been sleeping on the streets and there has been an enormous amount of begging in the UK. Interestingly a lot of begging takes place in front of ATMs, which is fairly intimidatory. After you draw your money out a beggar is there saying, ‘Can you spare me a pound or two?’. So there was a desire by the UK government to deal with the problem.

When it was elected in 1997 the new Labour government set up a social exclusion unit with the job of investigating how to reduce homelessness. In early 1998 a rough sleepers unit was set up within the social exclusion unit, which gives you an idea of bureaucracy in action. They set in place a three-year program which commenced in December 1999, with a target of reducing street homelessness by two-thirds by early 2002. To achieve that object they were given a budget of £200 million, which is about $600 million, over three years.

I met and had considerable discussions with the directors of the rough sleepers unit. They claimed success, pointing out that a census of rough sleepers carried out at the beginning of the program recorded about 2000. They said their latest census registers about 500 people, which is a very significant reduction. Interestingly, that census took place only a couple of weeks before I was there and there was a lot of press coverage of it, with the press saying it was a set-up job, that the police cleaned up the streets the night before the census collectors went out and therefore the figures were not necessarily correct. It goes without saying that the people at the rough sleepers unit deny that vehemently.

Various other statistics were quoted. For instance, in Liverpool they claimed a 50 per cent reduction in begging, a 25 per cent reduction in lower-level street crime and a 60 per cent reduction in rough sleeping. They all went on at great length, saying that that was achieved by a combination of policing, using the Vagrancy Act to move on rough sleepers and to deal with the begging, and as I said, a significant injection of money into the charities and local governments to deal with it.

It is perhaps worth recording the demographics of homelessness and begging, on which they have done a lot of research in the UK. I do not think that we have done that research but I would be surprised if its results were very different. They did their research in 1999 and estimated as follows: approximately 90 per cent of the street people were white males; 25 per cent were between 18 and 25 years of age; and only 6 per cent were over 60 years of age. They found also that more than half the people sleeping on the streets had a mental health problem; the vast majority of cases had alcohol problems; approximately one-third of the young people had drug problems; and in most cases there was a combination of drug and alcohol abuse. So it is a fairly difficult group to deal with.

I asked why there was a predominance of white males, given that in the UK there is certainly a strata of the coloured society that is not particularly well off. They highlighted that it was a pretty rough sort of business and there was a pecking order and essentially the coloured people were afraid to go and out and beg and to rough sleep because, being at the bottom of the pecking order, they were beaten up. So the reason that they were not out there was that they were afraid to go out there, which was interesting. They also introduced me to another term, ‘sofa surfing’, which means that people sleep on the sofas of their various friends. They claim that most of the coloured homelessness is taken up in sofa surfing.

The government produced various reports on the progress of the activity. I will table the report entitled Coming in from the Cold for the subcommittee’s use, which gives a progress report on the rough sleeping strategy for 2001. I will refer to a couple of quotes from it, because they are interesting in that they give an indication of the scale of the problem.

Under the heading ‘Providing a bed in place of a doorway’, it reports:

In London over 450 hostels provide around 19 600 beds for single homeless people. Quite often though the hostels were unable to help the very vulnerable people out on the streets. To address this issue the RSU set itself a target that would ensure that vulnerable rough sleepers had somewhere to go.

They report also that since the unit was set up in 1999 they had created an extra 930 hostel beds, an extra 600 special bed places, and an extra 1000 permanent hostel beds. That is the scale of the problem, with more than 20 000 hostel beds being in operation on any one night.

In talking about the challenge and showing why the problem is significant, the report also states:

In many other areas of the country the challenge of helping rough sleepers addicted to drugs or alcohol is also very tough. In nine cities around the country, from Manchester to Exeter, local authorities and voluntary organisations identified up to 80–90 per cent of their entrenched rough sleepers needed specialist treatment in order for them to come off the streets.

The rough sleeper and begging population is fairly mobile — and I will touch on some of the interesting facts about that. One of the interesting things that has been done is that a database has been set up. It seeks to track rough sleepers around the country. If they are sleeping rough in one suburb and, for example, the Footscray CAT team goes out to help them and has them on their books and then they are moving to Melbourne and the Central Mission CAT team has them on their books, they could be on the books of about half a dozen CAT teams because they are going all around the place. They have set up a database to try to identify them so that they know where they have come from and who is looking after them. I refer to that to highlight the amount of time, effort and money they are putting into addressing the problem.

Basically they use their Vagrancy Act of 1824, as amended, to deal with the issues of rough sleeping and of begging. Section 4 of the 1824 act says about rough sleeping that a person must not be prosecuted unless he or she has previously been directed to a reasonably accessible, free place of shelter and fails to apply for or is refused accommodation there.

They have to be offered free accommodation three times and refuse it before they can be acted against under the act. That is one of the reasons why they are trying to keep the database. Although their Vagrancy Act deals with rough sleeping it is pretty weak because it requires the offer of housing to be made and refused three times. However, there are some exclusions, as there always are under an act. For example, if he or she causes damage to property or infection with vermin or other offences then the provision that three strikes and you are out does not count.

That limitation was seen as a problem by both the police and some charities. In many case fairly convoluted programs were developed to try to move rough sleepers on. Very interesting comments were made. I am sure it is the same here — that all the social welfare agencies and the police see themselves on different sides of the debate. The police want to lock up the people and the charities want to look after them, saying they have a problem.

All the people in the charities I spoke to rather liked the provisions of the Vagrancy Act because they said the police were very useful in disrupting rough sleepers, on the basis that if the rough sleepers were constantly annoyed and life was made difficult for them they would be driven, as it were, into the arms of the charities to get a quiet life. They quite like the police going out there harassing them, because then the people said, ‘I have to do something to escape all this harassment’.

Various other programs have been worked out in conjunction with local government, and some were quoted to me. They include regularly sending street sweepers into known rough sleeping areas; regular — every hour on the hour — hosing down of footpaths that are used by homeless people; and setting up a basic tag team of the street sweepers, the hosers, the police and the crisis teams, who all go out together. They send in the street sweepers, hose down the footpath, send the police in, send in the street sweepers again, and the crisis teams follow on. At the end of the day people say, ‘I give up; I’ll go into the hostel’. I thought it was really interesting that the charities liked the police to help them force the people in.

The other area that was seen as being linked to rough sleeping was the major problem of begging. Begging is covered by section 3 of the UK Vagrancy Act and is punishable by a fine of up to £1000. Begging is a relatively lucrative enterprise and is used generally to support drug and alcohol habits. Depending on where it takes place, it is followed up by varying degrees of vigour by the police. Significant programs have been developed to discourage people from supporting beggars. This was also quite interesting. A lot of promotion was going into the fact that if you give money to beggars you are really only exacerbating the drug problem because they spend their money on drugs and alcohol. So giving them money is not really helping them; it is really just helping the drug problem. I will table these publications, which are quite interesting.

Because begging is a problem here, they could perhaps be thought about by the local Melbourne City Council or the government. There are big promotions on the sides of buses and everything saying, ‘If you really want to help me change my life, call this number’. In other words, they are saying, ‘Do not give money to the beggars. If you want to help these people, you can go to this help line where you can give money to the charities who will do the right thing by them, or you can volunteer to help them in other ways’. So there is a fairly significant promotion saying, ‘If you really want to help me change my life, call this number’, to discourage people from giving money to beggars, which they claim is pretty successful.

This is another thing I think we could consider, given that no people of the other colour are here. They also have another thing which they use occasionally called an antisocial behaviour order. They have all the various orders out of the Family Court and all that sort of thing that we have. But the antisocial behaviour orders can be put on people who are consistent offenders with antisocial behaviour and are therefore wanted by the police. If they breach the orders, there are all the penalties that go with that.

It is worth giving some more statistics on begging. A fairly major study into who the beggars are and why they beg was carried out for the government by the University of Luton, which interviewed some 260 beggars. Some of the key statistics are as follows. When asked why they were begging, 44 per cent said they had a problem with drugs — in other words, it was to feed their drug habit; 13 per cent said they wanted the money to drink; over 20 per cent of the people were begging because they had a problem with the law; and the remaining 40 per cent said that it was basically because of their family. So you can see that it is a pretty awful demographic.

Some of the people had been begging for sometime. Approximately 17 per cent had been begging for a year, and only 18 per cent had been begging for less than six months, although that varied from region to region. Although most beggars said they wanted food, drugs, alcohol and tobacco were the main things that kept coming up as to why people begged. Eighty per cent of beggars were begging several days a week, and 60 per cent were begging every day or as often as possible. In the major cities, particularly London, 86 per cent begged every day, and the begging took place whether the people received a social security benefit or not. Fifty five per cent of those begging received all or most of their income from begging.

Begging is well paid compared to the social welfare system. Sixty per cent were getting more than £20 a day, 12 per cent claimed to be making more than £50 a day, and in the capital cities — particularly London, for instance — 75 per cent were earning more than £20 a day, which is $60. The police told me that a hit of heroin was worth about £10. So basically they begged until they had about £20, went and bought the heroin, and came back and begged some more.

Some research was done on what sort of drugs they used. The majority had used cannabis — 86 per cent; amphetamines — 75 per cent; crack — 73 per cent; heroin — 73 per cent; cocaine — 67 per cent; LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs — 65 per cent; and nearly half had used solvents.

Mr MACLELLAN — Acting Chairman, may I interrupt the witness at this point?

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Certainly.

Mr MACLELLAN — Is that ‘have used in the past’ or ‘are using’?

Mr STRONG — Have used and are using. I was told that most of them are on heroin, with touch ups of crack. Whether they actually got into it by cannabis or LSD is a separate issue. But they are drugs that they have used.

Forty nine per cent of the beggars slept rough, and when asked why they did not sleep in shelters or free accommodation, the main reasons given were that they were too restrictive, they had too many rules, they did not like the other people there, and they would not let them use drugs there. They really just did not like all the restrictions of being in a hostel.

I refer to the relationship between begging and drugs. Estimates by police in London are that the number of rough sleepers and beggars using class A drugs range from 75 per cent to 90 per cent. It is usually heroin, but significant numbers are using crack as a top up or a bit of a treat. That is the fairly significant research they have done into who is out there. It is a pretty depressing picture of who is out there, and it is also a pretty depressing picture that many of them are not interested in really doing anything else — hence the schemes they have to disrupt them.

I also spoke to several charity groups who look after these people. One of them was a crowd called St Mungo’s, which is London’s biggest homeless agency. I will give you some more statistics, because they are interesting. St Mungo’s employs about 500 people — so it is a fairly big organisation — and it houses some 1000 people each night on average. It has teams that go out into the streets to find these people and bring them into the refuges, in many cases working in conjunction with the police. They estimate that they actually have to find and bring in over 50 per cent of the people. These people do not come to them; the majority are hauled off the street by the crisis teams, on many occasions against their will.

As mentioned before, they really appreciate the help of the police. They work with the police and also use the police to break up the critical mass. Where there are a half a dozen or a dozen people all begging or sleeping rough together, the crisis teams are unwilling to go in there because they are a bit scared, so with their good relationship with the police they go in there together. Most of the charities said their relationship with the police is really improving enormously and that they do work together.

The use of the police and council workers to disrupt the critical mass and provide protection to social workers when they go out there is something that both the police and the social welfare people talked a lot about.

The police made the point that the relationship they had with the social welfare agencies was also quite helpful to them. Out in this group of people there are some really nasty criminals, and through their links with the social welfare agencies that have links with this community they are able to finger the really bad criminals. The average, normal, passive drug addict tells the social welfare agency, ‘Fred over here on the next doorstep is a rapist and murderer’, and the social welfare agency often helps the police get the person by fingering. The police use the social welfare agency’s links with these people to help find the real criminals among them. The police say it is very helpful to them, and it is also helpful to the social welfare agencies that these really nasty people do not get into the hostels where they could cause damage. It is an interesting helping relationship to try to get the really bad criminals out.

The penultimate comment about it all by one of the St Mungo’s people I spoke to at the end of the day was that although they had done a lot to bring these people in and so on, simply getting them off the street was not really the solution to the problem because most of these people had a drug and alcohol dependency, and taking them off the street provided some sort of cosmetic, short-term solution but did not really provide a long-term solution. The social welfare person was of the view that the government needed to pump a whole lot more money into drug and alcohol rehab systems to solve the problem.

I had some discussions with the Home Office, which really runs the law, the police and the courts. A sentencing unit within the Home Office does a lot of research into sentencing and dealing with upgrading the law and how the law should be changed. There was really not a huge amount they could add to what we were driving at, but someone talked about some things which I think are interesting, and as a result will put them on the record.

The Magistrates Court in the United Kingdom has a very limited jurisdiction. It is limited to crimes punishable by six months imprisonment and a maximum fine of £5000, which is much less than what our Magistrates Court has. Under the Vagrancy Act the only option is fines; there are no imprisonment options, as we have. We have the imprisonment option for begging and so on, whereas they do not have that and have only fines for that.

Perhaps the most interesting issue he raised, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, is that the sentencing unit and the Home Office develop policy guidelines which they put out through the Home Office to the police forces across the country to tell them how to use the various acts. In other words, they have a policy that says, ‘In this particular law you will use section 26 this way.’, or, ‘You will not use section 26 at all; you will not arrest people for this’. They put out a policy position which effectively rewrites the act, and they do it without any parliamentary scrutiny at all. In other words, it is a fairly amazing system. If we want to amend an act it goes to Parliament to be amended, but they just put out guidelines saying, ‘This is how you will use the act’ or ‘will not use it’, which I found very interesting for the home of democracy.

In the various discussions I had with people Brighton was highlighted as an area which had been very successful in dealing with this problem. Brighton is a big coastal city. It was suggested that I go down there and talk to people there because they had a reputation for cleaning this thing up. I did so and spoke to them, and some of the key points that came out of that are interesting.

Initially they had done some quick surveying of their rough sleepers and beggars. They surveyed something like 30 people. They found that only two rough sleepers were not begging. In other words, the relationship between begging and rough sleeping was very close. Most of these people were between 25 and 35. Two-thirds had a criminal record; many had been in prison and had a long history of crime — theft, et cetera; nine had drug convictions; and others admitted to using drugs. Over half of those begging said they did so to sustain a drug habit, and the police noted to me that when carrying out this survey they thought that they did not necessarily get everybody who said they begged for drugs — because, after all, drugs are illegal — and that it was probably much more than that. Only one of the 30 interviewed came from Brighton. In other words, all the other rough sleepers and so on came from London and other areas because they thought Brighton would be an easier place to beg.

Brighton then developed a strategy to deal with this problem. It was really quite fascinating. People there talked about how they worked closely with the social welfare agencies and that they were kind and loving and were looking after people rather than being tough. They worked out a strategy which they called Operation Panther, which did not seem very warm and cuddly to me. Nevertheless, they called it Operation Panther to clean up the beggars. They identified the hot spots and increased the police patrols in those areas and worked closely with the local councils and voluntary sectors to clean them out — à la using street sweepers, hosing down, et cetera. Essentially, in the first case they warned people and referred them to the welfare agencies, and if they were then caught again they were arrested under section 3 of the Vagrancy Act for begging.

I would like to touch quickly on this use of the Vagrancy Act for begging, because it is quite interesting. I found it absolutely fascinating the way the Brighton police force dealt with this, as distinct from the way I saw the Westminster police dealing with it. In Brighton they arrested people on the second occasion they were found begging, and the police said this got them off the street for a little while. They were taken in front of the magistrate and they basically spent half a day in the courts, so that got them off the street. They were generally given a fairly mild slap on the knuckles and fined maybe £5, but virtually a very minor sanction; and before they went to the Magistrates Court they often had to be held in the police cells for one or two days while they were waiting for the court, so that likewise got them off the street. That is what they did, which is in a way fairly ineffectual.

That compares with the Westminster branch of the Metropolitan Police. In the UK all the agencies — you probably know this, Mr Maclellan — are locally based, so that the Westminster police look after Westminster and the Brighton police look after Brighton, and they try to make things good in their area. Certainly a lot of the way the Brighton police solved their problem was that when their stats said that only one of a group of beggars came from Brighton, that man was looked after in a Brighton shelter and the rest were basically exported over the Brighton border, and that became somebody else’s problem. So there was this amazing situation of getting rid of the problem by moving it elsewhere.

The way the Westminster police dealt with beggars was quite fascinating, given that the Brighton approach was really to get them off the streets by putting them in the cells, taking them before the magistrate and generally trying to wear them down and encourage them to go somewhere else. Westminster police did not give any warning. They arrested beggars straight up under the Vagrancy Act, but they did not keep them in the police cells — which they argued was a waste of time because all it did was give the beggar a bed for a couple of nights — and feed them and generally look after them before taking them before the magistrates, where they would get a £5 fine, which they would generally say they could not pay, so they would be let off with nothing. The view of the Westminster police was that all that was pretty useless. As well as that, if beggars are arrested for vagrancy they cannot be fingerprinted or in any other way taken into the criminal system to see if they have a record somewhere else, so the police cannot find out if these are people who have been charged with other offences.

The Metropolitan Police took a totally different tack, which was interesting. When they arrested somebody for begging they immediately released them on bail, which meant they could go back out on the street, but the advantage of that approach was that as the beggars made quite a lot of money from their activities, basically the police said, ‘How much money have you got in your pocket?’ — it might be £100 — and then, ‘We will have that as the bail, thank you’. So they immediately took their money away from them for bail. They also then put them back out on the streets, but they were on bail to come back to the Magistrates Court.

Their logic for this was interesting: they said that a lot of these people obviously skipped bail, so if they skip bail and the police find them again they are then arrested for skipping bail, which is a much more serious offence for which they can be then fingerprinted and run through the criminal system, so they can find out if they have a criminal record. They can in fact be put into jail for skipping bail, and the police can act on them in a more serious way.

Because of the way the UK police in regions, only the Westminster police kept the details of the beggars who had been arrested for the Westminster district and were out on bail, and they did not put those details into the central bail system for the whole of the UK. So if these beggars went and begged in the next-door police area, the fact that they had skipped bail would not be registered anywhere because only the Westminster police held that information. Of course the beggars knew this, so that was a further incentive: if they skipped bail they would not be begging in Westminster again because they knew they had skipped bail in Westminster and so they would go and beg in some other police force’s area. That again goes to the issue of how a lot of the solving of the problem was to move it across the border into somebody else’s area.

Both the police and the charities were very condemning of the Big Issue, the newspaper that is sold to allegedly help homeless people and down-and-outs, because they said the Big Issue was really just a front for all these other activities of begging. People would be begging and then the police would arrive on the scene and the beggars would drag out the Big Issue and say, ‘Does anybody want to buy the Big Issue?’, and as soon as the police were gone they would put it back in their case and continue begging. If they were looking for any excuse, the Big Issue was a front used by the beggars for a lot of their issues. Basically, the police and the charities were unanimous that the Big Issue should be wound up.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Are you saying that there is a publication in the United Kingdom known as the Big Issue and that the beggars pretend to be distributing copies of that to avoid arrest or being moved on as a vagrant?

Mr STRONG — Yes. You can buy it here at the railway stations. It is a publication that was set up specifically to try to help homeless people, whereby they would get a copy of this basically free and then they would sell it. It would give them an income stream and make them more independent, and it would make them little entrepreneurs.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Who is the publisher? Is it a welfare agency?

Mr HOMER — It sells for $3 at the moment, and I think the deal is that they get $1 and the publisher gets $2.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Is it a private sector publisher, a welfare agency or a charity organisation?

Mr DINSBERGS — It is one of the churches.

Mr STRONG — If you go to Parliament station most mornings or evenings, they are out there. This leads me to another fascinating issue on which both the charities and the police agree — that is, the whole issue of soup kitchens. They were all working hard to wind up these soup kitchens. They said that all these soup kitchens do — it is a bit like begging — is allow these people to indulge their habit, because they go along to the soup kitchens to get a feed and it does not cost them anything, it does not take long and the food is brought to them out in the streets, so they do not have to move far from their begging or sleeping places. All it does is encourage them to stay out on the streets.

The charities, which want to bring them into the shelters, are working hard to say, ‘If you want to run a soup kitchen, do it in my shelter, but don’t do it out on the streets, because all that does is encourage these people to stay out on the streets’. They are working hard to put all these soup kitchens and do-gooders who run around feeding people on the streets out of business. They say they are about halfway there, but apparently there are hundreds of do-gooder groups in London who run around and really just make life more pleasant for these people and encourage them to stay where they are.

As I said before, the wrap-up to Brighton’s information — which was very interesting, because they caused a lot of disruption to get people to move — was that their basic objective is to get people to move out of Brighton, which they have been very successful in doing. The Brighton police also made a very important general point, which was also made by some of the other police forces, that they saw this whole question of begging and rough sleeping as an issue that related to crime and not just as a social welfare issue. They said that if you have these people out there on the streets begging, making a mess, breaking windows and committing low-level larceny, you are condoning that low-level crime, which seeps into the culture of the community — the graffiti and all those things — and you are saying, ‘It’s okay, you can do it’. So they were all very active in saying that this sort of thing cannot be condoned, because it allows a culture of low-level crime to exist.

The Westminster police gave a quite interesting statistic. In the UK — as is the case here, no doubt — all the police forces have to put out a sort of performance plan which states that they are going to reduce house thefts by X per cent, car thefts by Y per cent and so on, and they all have this safer streets program which aims to clean up rough sleepers, beggars and so on. The Metropolitan Police said that when they came in very hard on this area — and they came in the hardest — without any work at all and as if by magic their stats on car thefts, for instance, where they were looking for a 5 per cent reduction, were reduced by 60 per cent, and they got a huge reduction in low-level larceny, simply because these people were off the streets. When you have been begging and you need a little bit of extra money for your hit of cocaine or your rough sleeping, you break a car window and steal something. So they said that cleaning these people off the streets has had a quite dramatic effect on all their other crime stats.

By way of reinforcing that, I spoke to the Oxford council and the police there, and they had a similar problem to Brighton’s. I will quote a couple of their statistics. In the six months from July to December 2001 they had 347 arrests for rough sleeping and begging. Of those arrested, 36 were found to be wanted for other offences — murder, fraud, drugs possession, theft, indecent assault — and 26 per cent were found to be come under what they call their Mental Health Act requirements, which deal with people who have mental problems. That is another good reason to try and clean these people up.

Mr MACLELLAN — Is that a mental health issue complicated by substance abuse, resulting from substance abuse or pre-existing to substance abuse — the chicken or the egg — or is it just part of a chaotic life?

Mr STRONG — They said these people were under these mental health requirements. Whether they got there as a result of drug abuse or not, I do not know.

Mr MACLELLAN — Of the ones there, they could put a mental health label on some of them?

Mr STRONG — Yes, on a lot of them. I found the following statistics fascinating, and I hope you do too, and I think they might be useful. I also spoke to the people from the employment services, and they obviously have, as we do, lots of programs to get people into employment by training them in the skills they need to get jobs and all that sort of thing. Interestingly, another statistic I have is that the UK government is budgeting £9 billion over the next three years in these back-to-work programs, and when you think that the population of the UK is about two and a half times that of Australia, £9 billion in back-to-work programs is a fairly mind-boggling figure. One of the other interesting things that was in the newspapers a lot over there is that the Blair government is now going into deficit, the booming UK economy notwithstanding.

However, these employment service people piloted two schemes with a view to getting the beggars, the street people and the highly disadvantaged not into work but into these back-to-work programs which lead them to work. There were two pilots of 100 people. One was run by a charity, and of the 100 people who were put through the program, 2 actually got through. A second program was run by an employment agency, and of the 100 who went through that program, about 6 got through. So these people had to acknowledge that these programs were fundamentally a failure.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Were the people who undertook the programs homeless or vagrants, or is this just an example of a general group?

Mr STRONG — No, they got 100 people who were basically of this class — we are talking about vagrants, rough sleepers and beggars — and who were prepared to go on this pilot program. So they had to find 200 people who were sufficiently interested.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — It was done on a voluntary basis?

Mr STRONG — On a voluntary basis.

Mr MACLELLAN — It would never be voluntary.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Given such a low success rate.

Mr MACLELLAN — There would be subtle pressures that would destroy any suggestion that it was voluntary.

Mr STRONG — But theoretically it was voluntary. They said that these were a total failure. It goes to the issue raised by the police, who said often that these people are fundamentally there by choice. They live well on begging, and they get a lot of money.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — The incidence of drug use seems to be extremely high.

Mr STRONG — Extremely.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — And that would be an incentive for many of them to continue with that lifestyle.

Mr STRONG — Yes.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — And you might almost have a revolving door situation of trying to get them into hostels where the staff may not have the resources or the training to treat, counsel and provide medical assistance.

Mr STRONG — And where they will not let them use drugs.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — That is right, so they go in and they come out.

Mr STRONG — So it is all fairly hopeless, in a way. It was interesting, too, that the Metropolitan Police in London, which is much more intensive than some of the other places, estimate that if somebody new comes onto the streets, like a young kid who has had some problem or something like that, they only last about 12 hours before they are in the system — before they are hooked on drugs and before they are taken under the wing of older people who look after them and teach them how to beg, which doorway to sleep in and how it all works. The Metropolitan Police said they have a very short time span in which to save these people, and they have some programs to try to do that, but they estimate that if they do not get somebody out of that environment in about 12 hours, they are gone. It is pretty depressing.

So I guess the basic comment of the people who ran this pilot was that these people essentially choose their lifestyle. They were more or less happy with it because they were running the drug habit, as you said, or they were in fact totally committed to drugs and alcohol and therefore they were not much interested in normal work. That begged the question as to whether anybody would actually employ them, the major problem always being drugs and alcohol. Notwithstanding all of that — this is what I found fascinating — they are launching a new program called Progress 2 Work, which will spend some £40 million over the next three years to try to help people who are on drugs and alcohol to find work. They aim to get 20 000 people who are currently on drugs and alcohol into the mainstream work force.

I asked them such things as who is going to employ these people, and they were very vague on all these issues, but the issue comes through that they are throwing money big time at this problem.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Is there a requirement with this Progress 2 Work program that the people involved take themselves away from drugs and alcohol, or will they continue?

Mr STRONG — No. They just simply say their criteria are people who say that they want to give it up.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Who say they want to give it up.

Mr STRONG — Yes, but everybody says they want to give it up. They are working on all those criteria; it is a fairly new program that they are launching.

One of the most fascinating sessions I had was with the Westminster branch of the Metropolitan Police. I guess they had this same sort of relationship with the social welfare agencies and so on. Once again there were the resources that they put into it — they had a special team of about nine officers that dealt with these issues. I had lunch with all of these guys and talked about it all. They are all plain-clothes people, which is interesting. They said it is not a problem being plain-clothes officers — ‘The beggars know who we are, and we know who they are’. They are out there all the time, arresting them, moving them on, trying to identify those who are new on the streets, and getting out and working closely with all the CAT teams. As I said, the Metropolitan Police are the ones who had this very interesting approach of putting people on bail so they could get them into the criminal system.

Perhaps one of the interesting things they had to say is that they have a radio link system in their major retail areas. This was set up not for beggars but for other sorts of crime — shoplifting and so on.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — You are referring to the Westminster police?

Mr STRONG — Yes, and there are a lot of shopping centres in this area. With the local shop owners, and funded by the local shop owners or the Chamber of Commerce or whatever, they set up their own short-wave radio network between all the shops, so if you were in the Safeway shop you could then go on to your own short-wave network and say to all the other shops, ‘This fellow who has just gone out of here looks a bit suss and is going into Coles next door; you had better watch him’. So they had their own intelligence networks set up around the shops, which were also police monitored. They had the whole radio network between the shops to look at behaviour, to report to each other on early warnings and to go to the shops, and they were talking about trying to extend that to include beggars. I thought it was fascinating that they had that internal network.

Mr MACLELLAN — When beggars/shoplifters are arrested by Westminster police, on average how much money do they have in their pockets?

Mr STRONG — They said they have a lot. The stats say that your average beggar is going to get £20 in an hour and more than £100 a day in these busy areas. That is why they come to Westminster. They have all the major — —

Mr MACLELLAN — But are there statistics or even information — even just impressions from the arresting officers — as to how much? I presume it is stretching the imagination to think they are depositing in the bank or in the hole in the wall during the course of the day. I take it they have got it with them, that when they are arrested they are found to have £200 or whatever it is with them. Do we have any idea how much money they have when they are arrested? Do they do a bit of shoplifting from 9 to 10 and then go begging from 10 to 12 and then perhaps do a bit of drug dealing after lunch? I take it this is a chaotic and fairly extraordinary life compared to any ordinary suburban citizen. But is this the pattern? I take it that they do not fit neatly into ‘I’m a beggar; I don’t do prostitution’, or, ‘I’m a prostitute; I don’t do begging’.

THE ACTING CHAIRMAN — They do it all.

Mr MACLELLAN — I would have thought they would have been doing it all.

Mr STRONG — As to what they have on them when they are arrested, it is really only anecdotal comments from the police, particularly the Westminster police, who said, ‘That is why we bail them, because we generally get £100 or something like that from them’.

Mr MACLELLAN — I take it that the book of the police from the arresting area will have what they had in their pockets, because it has to be returned to them.

Mr STRONG — Exactly. But as to what I got, it was that anecdotal evidence plus the survey evidence that said that certainly in London the beggars earned a lot of money.

Mr MACLELLAN — I think you said £40.

Mr STRONG — No. According to the survey done by Luton University, in the capital cities — in London, for instance — 75 per cent were earning more than £20 a day.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — This was the survey done by Luton University for the Rough Sleepers Unit?

Mr STRONG — Yes, but the police also said that in a lot of cases, because it is a drug and alcohol thing, they would be begging and they would get up to £60-odd and go and spend it, so they never got to have £1000 in their pocket because that was not the idea. The idea was to actually meet their current need, which was the next drink or the next hit or whatever.

Mr MACLELLAN — So the £100 or the £20 that the arresting officer finds in their pocket may be after they have purchased so much in drugs, plus a meal?

Mr STRONG — This was the other thing. They said generally that these people do not have to eat because the soup kitchens feed them. So basically they have no expenses to eat and they have no expenses to live, so 100 per cent of their disposable income is spent on drugs.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — And they would generally not be paying taxes.

Mr STRONG — That is right.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — We are getting on to an hour and a half’s evidence now.

Mr STRONG — I have just about finished. I wanted to give you one final thing that the Metropolitan Police said. They said that their people also did a lot in finding missing persons, particularly in London. They have certain responsibilities under the Children’s Act, which is this 12-hour thing that I told you about. As I said, they talked about the reduction in their car theft and shoplifting stats. I guess out of all of that it seemed to me that there was a clear consensus between both the police and the charities that these penalties under the Vagrancies Act were necessary. Nobody said that they were not necessary, because they all put them to good use. That was the bottom line. The more intractable question is what you do about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Thank you, Mr Strong. That was certainly a very interesting presentation. I would just like to seek the advice of the staff as to the status of these documents in the evidence process, because I can well imagine that they would be very valuable to members of the subcommittee if they were somehow to be distributed or read into the evidence or tabled. I am not sure what the procedure is. Could I have some advice on that?

Mr DINSBERGS — Do you want to mention them into the evidence as to what the publications are? The committee can then use them for whatever purpose they like and take away from them whatever note they want.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — I think some formal recognition of the information would be useful, just so that in future people referring to this evidence will understand that there is some very excellent information available which Mr Strong has provided.

Mr STRONG — Perhaps I could then table for inclusion in the evidence the following documents: two documents published by the Rough Sleepers Unit, aiming to discourage people from giving to beggars; a document called Coming in from the Cold, a progress report on government strategy on rough sleepers, dated summer 2001; a document entitled Looking for Change on the role and impact of begging on the lives of people who beg, which is research carried out by Luton University for the Rough Sleepers Unit, dated August 2001; various documents, policy statements and surveys from the Brighton–Hove police district, dealing with rough sleepers and begging; and an annual report dated 2000–01 from St Mungo’s, a major UK charity, dealing with homelessness.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN — Thank you for reading those into the record. I am sure members of the subcommittee and others who refer to this evidence in the future will benefit greatly from having access to those documents. On behalf of the subcommittee I thank you, Mr Strong, for a very enlightening presentation and providing some very valuable evidence to the committee.

Subcommittee adjourned.

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