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Local Authority Responses to people with NRPF during the pandemic
4.Discussion As noted in the introduction, Luke Hall’s letter to local authorities on March 26th 2020 directed them to ‘provide self-contained accommodation’ to people identified as at risk of sleeping rough as well as those living in accommodation where self-isolation might be difficult. However, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) did not set that obligation on any statutory footing or clarify what powers local authorities were expected to exercise in order to meet it. Local-authority practitioners were thus given little or no guidance on their responsibilities to those they had, effectively overnight, been instructed to support. This in turn meant that those seeking or provided with support had no idea what to request or to expect. As our welfarediary evidence suggests, many people were left unsure about whether they should even expect to be fed. This has contributed to feelings of isolation, hopelessness and stress. As Kwame told us: ‘They’ll take it sooner or later, and I’ll end up back on the streets’. A degree of confusion with respect to provision is unsurprising given that the pandemic led to sudden, and arguably quite radical, social-policy directives being issued at short notice as a crisis response to the changed social conditions engendered by a pandemic. Yet our research also indicates that local-authority practitioners’ understanding of statutory duties and obligations towards people with NRPF is often lacking even where statutory obligations have been established over a long period of time (i.e. well before the pandemic). It is well established, for example, that Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 obliges local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area identified as ‘in need’, and that the services rendered may include the provision of accommodation and subsistence support. There is a substantial body of literature which practitioners can rely on around the application of Section 17 to children and families with NRPF (NRPF Network, 2018). Yet one participant in this research, the senior manager of a children’s services team, told us in response to a question about local-authority duties to children and families that ‘the council does not have a responsibility under Section 17’. That particular contribution may be regarded as an outlier, given more informed responses from other local authority respondents. But if one out of the 17 local authorities who responded to our call for evidence is prepared to go on record as understanding itself to have no statutory obligations to children and families with NRPF, the question of what people with NRPF are being told ‘off the record’ does present itself. Tia’s case study is illustrative here. She was lawfully resident in the UK, albeit with a condition applied to her leave to remain denying her recourse to public funds (a condition she was seeking to have removed). Tia approached the local authority destitute, having lost her source of income, with no means by which to feed her family, and facing eviction from her home due to rent arrears. 68
