Prince William & ‘ending homelessness’

Watch: Prince William: We Can End Homelessness (ITV)

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Last week, ITV broadcasted two hour-long programmes Prince William: We Can End Homelessness in which the future King outlined the ambition of his initiative Homewards.

The programme included plenty of footage of the Prince talking about why he cares about homelessness and the influence of his mother taking him to the charities Centrepoint and The Passage when he was young.  There were scenes of him serving Christmas dinner to grateful recipients, embracing people who have been homeless and listening to their stories.

The programme promoted the ambition of Prince Williams’ initiative Homewards to show that ‘we can end homelessness’ by funding six areas in the UK with £500,000 each. It’s a project that goes far beyond the normal boundaries of Royal charity patronage. And it is this ambition which means the programme and the initiative need a proper critique and honest evaluation.

I want to avoid sounding cynical or snide. In many ways it is great that the future King thinks and cares about these issues and he comes across as decent and sincere. 

But my concern is that too often the public conversation around homelessness is confused, ill-informed, naïve and sentimental.  And however well-intentioned, I think this programme exacerbated these tendencies.

These are my three main reasons:

1.Its ambition is naïve

The homelessness crisis in the UK is created by a broken housing system, economic greed and severe relational poverty. It is the most serious social challenge facing in the UK; so any talk of ‘ending it’ needs to be rooted in reality.

Prime Ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to Boris Johnson have launched well-funded initiatives to reduce rough sleeping. The manifesto of the last Conservative government committed them to end rough sleeping by 2024 but they got nowhere near.  The official data released last week showed rough sleeping had risen by almost 20% in London alone.

And remember that rough sleeping is merely the visible tip of a far bigger homelessness iceberg affecting hundreds of thousands of people. There are more people homeless in temporary accommodation than ever before. 

The funding Homewards is providing amounts to £100k a year for each area. Give or take, that will cover around two full-time members of staff. Its peanuts compared to the government funding that has been spent in recent years. So if huge state funding and targeted coordination did not end rough sleeping, how can a Royal initiative with a tiny fraction of funding seek to ‘end homelessness’?

There is no doubt that Prince William’s initiative has great convening power because the combination of a moving cause and Royalty will always attract involvement. But gatherings and workshops only go so far. As someone working on the frontline in one of the Homeward areas said to me last week:  ‘We don’t need post-it notes, we need policies’.

2. It de-politicised the issue

There was a non-political inoffensiveness about the programme which betrayed its superficiality. Take this statement from the Homewards website about why homelessness continues to exist:

Despite tireless efforts across the sector and beyond, it continues to exist because we too often focus on managing the problem rather than working to prevent it. To end it, it will take every one of us, from every sector of society and every corner of the UK, working together and making unique contributions to support our locations and galvanise momentum.

This is just vague, inoffensive waffle. Where are the specifics about the unaffordability of housing, relationship breakdown, inequality or the challenge to greed?  Addressing homelessness means getting involved in contentious issues such as poverty, affordable housing, welfare, immigration, refugees, family support, domestic violence and how to deal with anti-social behaviour.

The programme included a clip of a phone-in discussion on LBC where someone rightly said:

“Homelessness is cured by government policy not by charity and royal patronage”.

If Prince William had committed himself to addressing a chiefly relational issue such as ‘loneliness’ then a non-political approach could work.  But homelessness is not just purely relational – it is also structural and economic. And therefore it is necessarily political.

3. Where are the new ideas?

Ever since Homewards was launched I have been asking people more closely involved what the initiative is actually doing.  What I have heard is so vague that it gives me little confidence that new ideas will emerge.

The homelessness charity I work for, Hope into Action, is based on two genuinely distinctive ideas. Firstly, encouraging people with capital to share their wealth through buying houses which we turn into homes. And secondly, through the engagement of local churches who provide our tenants with friendship and community. This combination of financial and social capital offers a fresh and innovative approach.

In contrast, Prince William’s programme was bland and safe. It included the full Bingo card of homeless sector jargon: ‘lived experience’, ‘trauma-informed’, ‘Housing First’ and, most annoyingly, ‘Let’s learn from Finland’. But it lacked brave voices challenging the status quo and bringing new ideas which speak to the needs of today.

A matter of justice

Prince William’s background is relevant because he is part of a family which embodies wealth and privilege in the starkest way possible. Associating yourself with campaigns against homelessness and poverty inevitably raises difficult questions because these are matters of social justice and not just personal good-will.

And in the same week as William’s programme, another story broke about the tax-free millions that the Royal estates make from charging public bodies like the NHS and Ministry of Justice. Perhaps changing these contracts and paying more tax is a good place to start to create a more just country?