Lies, damn lies and statistics

When former home secretary Suella Braverman spoke of homelessness as a 'lifestyle choice' in November 2023, she implored a presumed majority of 'law-abiding' citizens to consider the invasive criminal presence of the street-homeless community and in particular the foreigners among them. They were, she said, choosing to blight 'our communities' with their antisocial behaviour, and must be stopped from taking over our streets with their 'rows of tents'.

Braverman's focus on refugee camp optics is nothing new. There is always us and them. Homelessness discourse has been shaped by repeated attempts to 'tackle' the problem through criminalisation and legitimised hostility (Cooper and McCulloch, 2023). Representations of a homeless moral underclass – deviant, undeserving and invasive – are ingrained in policy, legislation and practice.

They inform tropes of feckless criminality within the public lexicon (Dobson, 2019; Cloke et al., 2001). As the unsafety of extreme social exclusion is further rationalised through pathologies of destitution, so homelessness becomes defined and defining as a self-inflicted state of perpetual emergency (Walker & Chase, 2013). 

Once abject devaluation and stigmatisation of the homeless population becomes a cultural norm, it's a short step to suggesting the eradication of 'the homeless' from 'our' streets – even if they've literally nowhere else to go.

The supposed deviant irrationality of street homelessness and its danger to 'us' forms the heart of Braverman's political rhetoric and has served to justify the steady dismantling of state provision and dogmatic apathy towards 'inevitable' homeless mortality (Cooper & McCulloch, 2023). Quantitative homeless research has the potential to lend scientific credibility to this logic through the situated top-down knowledge it produces. 

But statistics also bear depressing witness to the symptoms of failed political decision-making as long-term trends of rising need and diminishing provision give way to the mounting urgency of the current crisis. Here, a chronic lack of affordable housing and inadequate interventions to mitigate the increased cost of living pushed 26 per cent more people into street homelessness in 2022 compared to 2021 as significant real-term cuts were delivered to most frontline services (The Kerslake Commission, 2023). 

All this after the government's 2020 'Everyone In' Covid-19 strategy housed 37,000 people experiencing street homelessness and exposed the problem as nearly nine times greater than official estimates (Crisis, 2021). In 2022, with everyone 'back out' again, there were more than 1,300 deaths, an 85 per cent increase since 2019 (Hussen, 2023).

Statistics offer certain objective 'truths', then, but the chaos of unbelonging that homelessness embodies deserves more than observation. Statistics cannot coherently describe the confounding circumstantial and structural disadvantages that create and perpetuate homelessness, nor address the epistemic injustice this degree of exclusion represents. 

Qualitative and interdisciplinary research demonstrating the effects of individual and institutional explanations of homelessness is better placed to reveal its ideological roots, and to offer much-needed routes for emancipatory allyship.

References

Cloke, P., Milbourne, P. & Widdowfield, R. (2001). Making the homeless count? Enumerating rough sleepers and the distortion of homelessness. Policy and Politics, 29(3), pp.259–279. doi.org/10.1332/0305573012501341. 
Crisis (2021). 'Everyone In' exposed gaps in government approach to rough sleeping. 
Dobson, R. (2019). Policy responses to 'rough sleepers': Opportunities and barriers for homeless adults in England. Critical Social Policy, 39(2), pp. 309–321. doi.org/10.1177/0261018318817483.
Homeless Link (2023). Rough sleeping in England rises by over a quarter: Homeless Link responds. 
Hussen, D.A. (2023). More than 1,300 people died while homeless in UK during 2022. The Guardian. 
The Kerslake Commission (2023). The Kerslake Commission 2023: Turning the Tide on Rising Homelessness and Rough Sleeping'. Av
Walker, R. & Chase, E. (2013). Separating the sheep from the goats: Tackling poverty in Britain over four centuries. In Gubrium, E., Pelissery, S. and Lodemel, I. (eds) The Shame of It: Global Perspectives on Anti-Poverty Policies. Bristol: Policy Press, pp 133–56.

Noughty politics

Kayleigh Laughlin, MSc student at The Open University, unravels the impact of crime statistics on millennials.

'The most reliable crime statistics – those crimes actually recorded by the police – show that crime in England and Wales has risen by almost 850,000 in the last five years. While burglary and car crime have fallen gun crime has doubled; robbery has gone up by more than half; and most damning of all, violent crime has increased by 83 per cent. Last year it hit the one million mark for the first time ever. That is 3,000 violent crimes every day – and more than a hundred violent crimes every hour.' – Conservative Leader Michael Howard's speech, Middlesborough, 2004

Provocative? Yes. Frightening? Also, yes. True? Not quite. With statistics such as these, would it be any wonder that millennials – coming of age in 2004, and often accused of having a fear of everything – may have developed a chronic fear of crime?

Of course, fear of crime is not exclusive to this generation: each has had its own tailor-made sense of victimhood shaped by the political landscape of the time. But whilst Michael Howard's use of figures is certainly convincing, the reality was that crime was on a downward trajectory, having fallen consistently since 1995. 

The British Crime Survey of 2004/05 stated that violent crime had decreased by 11 per cent compared with the previous year and yes, whilst it might be true that the recorded violent crime saw a 7 per cent increase, this figure is not a reliable one. It is widely accepted that the British Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey for England and Wales) is a more reliable representation of violent crime due to the inconsistent and discretionary nature of police recording.

Coupled with the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standards in 2002, how reliable was the 'most reliable' information provided by the leader of the opposition and former Home Secretary? It is of little doubt that such an inflammatory review of the state of crime in Britain helped fuel the fire of Penal Populism synonymous with New Labour, and curated a demand for punitive responses from the British public. This reinforced the belief that if New Labour's rallying cry is to be 'tough on crime', then even Howard must be right.

In a moment of bipartisan alignment, in the same year as Howard's speech, newly appointed Home Secretary David Blunkett played his hand by launching the Prolific and Priority Offenders Strategy and declaring that 'a hard core of just 5,000 offenders commit one million crimes each year' putting local communities in peril.

This new punitiveness painted a picture of hooded youths and binge drinkers occupying spaces where young millennials walk to school and spend their Saturdays. Since then, Millennials have lived in a perpetual cycle of political warfare; the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on gangs, fuelled by politicians' fetish for big numbers. Arguably, the psychological result has been a generation of over-cautious, suspicious, sceptical, and anxious 30-somethings, apprehensive for the next criminal epidemic.