Johnson’s ‘mend and make do’ approach

Alastair Campbell, The Independent

The town and city centres remain quieter than pre-coronavirus, despite the government efforts to get people back to work. But there is one part of street life that seems to be returning all too quickly to ‘normal.’ Street life indeed; as in people living on the streets.

There was a moment, when the country was rallying round, and the government was in its brief ‘whatever it takes’ phase, when we realised, it is possible after all, to provide shelter for those poor souls who don’t have it. National and local government, charities, hotels, everyone pulled together, and it felt like it worked.

Boris Johnson, Robert Jenrick, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock, they all bathed in the warm glow. Credit where credit due, I thought, even if a part of me wanted to remind them that when Labour was in power, it had not needed a pandemic to take successful action on rough sleeping. But now, like so much else in the file marked “UKGovt2020/Covid-19”, it appears they worried more about the headlines generated at the time, than the lives of the people the warm glow stories were about.

Jenrick, a man not short of homes of his own, and famously someone whose decision-making helped property billionaire Richard Desmond at the expense of one of the poorest areas in the country, proclaimed that 90 per cent of rough sleepers had been put into proper shelter “to protect them from the virus.” “Everyone In,” the scheme was called. But while he and Johnson were patting themselves on the back, there was an awful lot of “Everyone Out” going on in the real world beyond the Downing Street briefing room. And in any event, the Office for Statistics Regulation has rebuked Jenrick for making his 90 per cent claim without publishing any supporting data. A trend under this government.

Just as so many charities warned would happen, the pandemic saw a surge of people being made homeless when the services and facilities on which they relied were closed because of Covid-19. The suspicion is that ministers were more motivated by assuring their nightly, taxpayer funded focus groups that they were getting potential health hazards off the streets, than they were by the welfare of people they had been driving past in their government cars for years as the numbers living on the streets mounted, and became normalised.

For April to June, the charity Streetlink has reported a year on year rise of 36percent in the number of alerts by members of the public about rough sleepers, a total of almost 17,000 – that’s the capacity of the stadium of Blackpool Football Club.

It is against this backdrop that the government plan to lift the ban on evictions, introduced in March to help people falling behind on rent, is so controversial. The governments in Scotland and Wales announced extensions, putting the UK government under pressure to follow suit – another trend there, as we saw most recently with the exams debacle – and they have announced a temporary one-month reprieve, doubtless in the hope something else will turn up to occupy the Opposition in the meantime. Even former Tory Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has described such a short-gap solution as ‘pointless’ without further legislative measures to give greater security to tenants.

Shelter, the homeless charity, estimates 227,000 private renters have fallen into arrears since the pandemic and are at risk of losing their homes. We are now talking enough to fill the grounds of Blackpool, Burnley, Birmingham City, Nottingham Forest, Celtic, and West Ham’s Olympic Stadium.

On 21 March, exactly five months ago, I published a 20 point guide to crisis communications, intended to be helpful. Number five was this: “Provide short, simple updates of everything happening across government as it relates to the virus. Pre-empt the difficult issues that are bound to arise, be that prisons, mental health, domestic violence, and so on, and set out the work being done, any changes being made, any messages you want to send. Do not shy from the complexity and the vastness of the possible ramifications. Do not pretend it is easy or straight-forward.”

I just do not believe Johnson has ever done that. Take mental health. I may be wrong, but I am not sure he has ever addressed it, other than in passing. The mental health minister is Nadine Dorries. The issue barely seems to register on the government agenda. Yet, as the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported this week, the pandemic has seen a doubling in the number of people reporting symptoms of depression, and leading psychiatrists have warned that mental illness will be “the second pandemic.”

Frontline workers operating under massive stress; bereaved families who could not console or their loved ones as they died; children and students having their education turned upside down; businesses going to the wall, people losing their jobs and homes; you do not need to be an agony aunt or a shrink to know there are huge problems ahead.

Likewise, domestic violence has rocketed, in the UK as elsewhere, and though I follow these issues closely, I am unaware of any coherent government strategy on it.

Nobody expects the government to cure every ill, and everyone appreciates this crisis has thrown up a stack of off the scale hard challenges, and put enormous pressures on the public purse. But we are entitled to expect the government at least to be aware what the challenges are, and think of how to deal with them before a problem become a crisis. That we are heading to a homelessness crisis, and a mental health crisis, seems fairly evident.

The problem here is not just government competence, woeful though their performance on so many aspects of Covid-19 has been; it is a question of values.

When it comes to problems facing people at the wrong end of the economic and social scale, or those deemed “weak” — the homeless, the mentally ill, the victim of domestic violence – from Johnson down, they seem to have a blind spot.