Homing In on Homelessness

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. Huddled in doorways. Living in sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. Rough sleepers are a common sight in our cities. But the new Prime Minister says he wants to end that. So how can the problem of homelessness be solved? What is it that leaves people without a roof over their heads? Are more hostels the answer? Or are there always going to be those who don't or can't cull in from the streets?

[00:00:27] What? The Why Curve. Well, first of all, I don't think hostels are the answer, are they? I mean, at best, it's an interim solution. But the reality is everyone's got to have a secure, safe home where they feel comfortable and where they can start building their future from. You don't get that from a hostel where you, you know, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of people who are homeless who've got mental problems. Well, that, I think, is a massive part of it, really. I think it is.

[00:00:55] But even if you're not one of those people with a mental problem, if you find yourself in a hostel, you're going to be surrounded by people who do. And so that's, you're not going to pave your own path forward from, you know, how have you got to that situation? Hostels are definitely not the answer. We just need more homes, pure and simple. Well, we do. And they are building homes, but not at the rate they need to. But I wonder if it is just not being enough homes. Well, you know, is it prices? This is the interesting question. What is the central problem? Is this, you know, marital breakdown, which I think, or relationship breakdown,

[00:01:24] which I think is probably the root of a lot of it. Yeah. Poverty, obviously. Yeah. And but is it also they can't afford to buy a house as part of that? Or I just don't know. Have you ever thought that it could happen to you? Because I feel as though all through my life, I felt as though, you know, you could just be a short step away from all of this. Like you've got a job, you lose your job, your marriage breaks down. And you can't afford to pay the mortgage or your rent anymore. You've got nowhere to go. You're on the streets.

[00:01:52] I mean, it doesn't feel that many steps removed, does it really? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I think, you know, we, you know, should a certain list of things go wrong, you know, all of us could be there. I mean, there's certainly colleagues within the media industry. There was some famous guy. I think he was on ITV years ago. A news presenter was found living under Brighton Pier at one point later on, simply because, you know, things had gone badly wrong. It can happen to absolutely anybody, which is another issue to say,

[00:02:20] well, if that's the case, is there any safety net you can put in place so we don't have rough sleepers? Well, I mean, Britain seems to have it worse than most. So why is it that we are so bad at it? But also more to the point, why has it got so much worse? And it has got worse over the last 10 years in the UK. So we know that people have been turfed out of psychiatric hospitals for whatever reason. Yeah, the big old ones were closed. Yeah. But I mean, and that's, you know, that seems to be happening quite a bit all over the world as well,

[00:02:50] for whatever reason, because actually the amount of people with some sort of mental health disorder has increased enormously. So that's certainly not helping the situation. But is there a quick answer? I mean, there was a quick answer during COVID, wasn't there? There was. They got them all off the streets, but it didn't last. I mean, that's an interesting question. Why? Let's talk to someone who's really studied this in depth, and that's Jo Richardson. She's Professor of Housing and Social Inclusion at Nottingham Trent University, and she joins us now.

[00:03:17] So, Jo, it's interesting that you're looking at housing. I mean, we are talking about homeless people, and the answer obviously is that, well, they don't have a house. And it seems like a very simplistic answer to say, well, if they did have a house, the problem would go away. Is it as simple as that, saying there just aren't enough houses to go around or enough cheap houses to go around, so people get themselves into a situation where they just can't afford to live in a house, and they've got no choice. They've either got to be in temporary accommodation, or they've got to be sleeping on the street. Well, you're right, Phil.

[00:03:47] Affordable housing is a really important part of the solution, but it's not the only thing. So housing is a vital ingredient, but there's so much more that's needed to support and sustain homes for people so that they are able to access a shelter over their head, but also all of the support, the connection with community, the access to employment, the ability to undertake education in a space that feels secure, comfortable and affordable.

[00:04:16] So there is a lot more to the issue than just the bricks and mortar. Well, I was going to say, let's dig into that, because my memory, going back to the 1970s, in the early 1970s I was in London, we didn't tend to see a lot of people living on the street. Maybe they just weren't visible, but I do remember a point, maybe the early 80s, late 70s, where you suddenly began to see cardboard cities in certain places in London, for example, and other places, people living in doorways or sleeping in doorways anyway.

[00:04:45] Was there something that changed then that really made that happen? Is that part of the reason that we still can't get rid of homelessness? There have been multiple policy, legislative and practical societal changes that have had an impact on affordable housing and homelessness. So the people that you see experiencing rough sleeping are just the tip of the iceberg. But if we look just at them, if we look at the rough sleeping snapshot that was published last year,

[00:05:13] and the count happens in the autumn of each year. On a single night, this snapshot showed 4,793 people were counted, visibly sleeping on the street. As I say, that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more hidden homelessness figures behind that, and I'm sure we'll go on to discuss that more. But I think there are images in our mind, and it might be that if we step off a train on the way home from work,

[00:05:41] we will see people who are visibly experiencing rough sleeping. But there have been changes in history, both in this country and across the globe. And I really remember a moment that actually got me into my housing career back in 1991, volunteering for a homelessness charity in New York. So this was before Giuliani and Bloomberg and the mayors between them sort of cleaned the streets of New York, as it were. And the visible homelessness was astonishing

[00:06:11] to a person moving out of a fairly rural place in Britain, having come from a stable background. But those images really imprint themselves on your mind, and it's what compels us to do something about the problem. So those people who are on the streets, as you say, they're just the tip of the iceberg. Is it because they can't find a hostel, for example, to live home? Just before we started talking to you, I was saying hostels are clearly not the answer either, because that's just a temporary solution. And all the stuff that you talked about, you've got to be able to find a job, you've got to build your life back up again

[00:06:40] from whatever incident put you into that situation in the first place. But are those people homeless because they are on the streets? Are they on the streets because they don't want to choose another option? Or is it because that option is just not open to them? There's very little choice when it comes to people who are living on the streets, who are experiencing rough sleeping. And sometimes you might hear politicians talk about people choosing not to take a hostel accommodation.

[00:07:09] Having spoken with a couple of people experiencing this issue, the choice is extremely limited if the hostel is not appropriate. If there is somebody who is experiencing harassment or feeling that they are in danger as opposed, as part of where they're living in the hostel, if they feel that that accommodation is going to make the situation worse, it can also be that the person feels incredibly distanced and lonely from a community that they have established.

[00:07:38] So the complexity of long-term rough sleeping is something that cannot be solved by a roof over someone's head alone. There has to be wraparound support. And we know what works in this area. So we know how to deal effectively with rough sleeping. So it's to give someone a stable home. So not temporary night by night solutions in shared accommodation, but give someone a stable home with no preconditions,

[00:08:06] and then you wrap the support around them. So the hostel accommodation and the experiences that we might have seen on the streets, you know, in decades gone by, were the result of an approach called staircasing, which is where an accommodation provider or a homelessness charity or a local authority might try and resolve a homelessness situation by saying, you need to prove that you are able to sustain a tenancy.

[00:08:35] And who can do that if they've been living, experiencing rough sleeping on the street? So the staircasing model is flipped on its head if you take a housing first approach or a housing led approach. And we know it works. We've piloted it. And we have some of the results. But it needs to be affected over a much longer time frame to be able to get that really good evidence. Would it work for everybody, though? Because it isn't the point that people arrive on the streets for all sorts of reasons.

[00:09:05] I mean, when our introduction mentioned mental health issues, for example, what you're talking about, you know, I suppose if one takes the point of view of the councils and say, well, we don't want people in places where they might turn them into drug dens or all kinds of criminal activities, you could kind of understand the reluctance. So is it a situation where you have to change that approach to depend on the individual concerned? I think that's exactly what Housing First does, actually.

[00:09:32] It wraps around the support according to the individual needs. And so it's appropriate to the individual that is in front of you. So it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, but the support is very much tailored to the person in front of you, depending on the situation behind that. So homelessness occurs when two things collide together, where the societal structure, so whether that's around increasing unemployment,

[00:09:58] unaffordability of housing in a particular area, for example, where those societal issues collide with individual complex needs, whether that is aligned with mental health, historical trauma, domestic abuse, any of these things can factor in to develop individual traumas that collide with the societal inadequacy in delivering sufficient affordable homes, and that creates homelessness. The Housing First approach says,

[00:10:27] we're not going to make people jump through lots of hoops to prove that they can be a good tenant. It says, we provide the shelter, we get the bespoke support in to help that person. Because home isn't an individual effort. If we think that home for all of us is our planet, and then we might associate with our country or our region or our town or village, that needs to be a decent place for everybody living in it. We can't only attend to these individual needs. We need to think about community as well.

[00:10:55] And the reason why, I mean, the common reason for a lot of people is that they just don't have the money to be able to afford a house. I mean, because they are, for example, subject to domestic abuse and they've left the house and they weren't the income earner, or they've lost their job and they can't afford to pay the rent anymore and they don't have any money saved. I mean, Roger and I were saying, you know, we could all just be a short step away from all of that and you find yourself with no future, which is a terrible thing for society to say.

[00:11:25] But if you're told, well, okay, here is some accommodation and you can build yourself up from there. You've got a place now. You've got your own safe space. You can start looking for work. You can start building your life back together again. I mean, to not provide that is just pure negligence, isn't it, from society? Absolutely. Well, it's cost, isn't it? I mean, Joe, we're all talking about it. It sounds lovely, but it costs money, doesn't it? Yeah, but those people work. They start paying taxes.

[00:11:53] You know, if you want to look at it purely from the monetary point of view, but it's also, even though it's a cost, it's what you expect society. There's plenty of places around the world. I think Finland, for example, has done a lot of work in reducing homelessness. They just built a lot of apartments for people to live in. Problem solved. It's not rocket science. I agree with you, Phil. It's not rocket science. And Finland are sort of the poster child of housing first. They have done it. I mean, they have a different context.

[00:12:23] So they've historically had a different approach to social welfare. The population size is vastly different. So there are differences with this country and Finland that make comparison challenging. But they are a really good example to learn from. And indeed, we do learn from them. A charity called World Habitat that I'm involved with has undertaken a European end homelessness campaign.

[00:12:51] And it's just done its 10-year evaluation of that project. And Finland is a really good example that they include there, as well as where this concept started in the United States. So the affordable housing is really, really crucial. You can't start without that.

[00:13:09] So if the number I cited earlier of 4,793 people on a single night counted, and let's bear in mind there's a methodological issue with just using that approach to understanding how many people sleep rough on the streets. If we think in addition to that in this country, there are over 134,000 households living in temporary accommodation.

[00:13:35] And within those families, that's 176,130 children. That's one in every 78 children in English schools are living in temporary accommodation. So that's like the bed and breakfast kind of accommodation that councils provide. That's what we're talking about. That's not home. You can't do your homework. You can't cook a nutritional meal. You can't get ready for a hard day's work from accommodation like that, where it's not temporary.

[00:14:04] And although the word temporary accommodation is used, some families are living in those types of shared spaces for years, because we don't have sufficient council and housing association housing. We have an affordable homes programme. We have been selling social housing for decades and losing housing through that programme. We don't have enough units of accommodation, you know, enough bricks and mortar, that we also have challenges in.

[00:14:34] I guess cross-party political will to deliver this as a large-scale long-term infrastructure project. And that's what's needed. Because of the cost, isn't it? Because of the cost. But the cost of not providing is huge. For sure. There's a social and welfare cost. Well, there's a health cost as well, guys. People aren't healthy living on the street. That's really what I meant by a social and welfare cost, which I differentiate from a financial cost.

[00:15:02] So all of those costs of not providing are massive. And there have been a number of research projects undertaken. I mean, Shelter have done a project looking at homelessness in the classroom about parents living in temporary accommodation and the impact that has on their children's physical and mental health. There's been an all-party parliamentary group looking at this issue that published in January 2026 about the impact on neurodivergent children.

[00:15:29] There's been another project called the champions research project, which has also looked at the impact on under fives in temporary accommodation. Having really disruptive impact on their long-term lifetime futures. Their ability, if you look in the future, educational and employment opportunities because of what happened to their family when they were living in temporary accommodation, when they were under five.

[00:15:54] If you then look at the financial costs, in London, in a single day, they are spending five and a half million on temporary accommodation. I mean, I was going to ask you that precise point. The amount of money being spent on that, surely it's cheaper to provide permanent accommodation. But do you also get annoyed by this term of affordable housing? Because it's used by – so developers say, yeah, we're going to build a block of flats and we're going to offer some affordable housing as part of that.

[00:16:24] And comes out as being 20% less than the market price for a small number of houses. I mean, it's a misused term, isn't it? It is. It is. Affordable is not necessarily always affordable. It can be, but it depends on what the housing market's doing and what the relative earnings are. So affordable housing, it's a really broad umbrella term.

[00:16:51] And it includes homes that could be charged at up to 80% of local market rent. So if you're looking at some of the London housing markets, then – Yes. Affordable homes in Chelsea would be interesting, wouldn't they? Well, absolutely. So as a concept, it's a misnomer. Are you asked if I get annoyed about it? I don't, because it's not a lot of point getting annoyed.

[00:17:14] But it is unfortunate that it's used, because I think the public might misunderstand what some of the policies are talking about. They're not always talking about affordable housing. Well, let's go back to an older term. Yeah. Social housing. Council housing. That's what we used to talk about. And it's interesting that Andy Burnham has come up with two – he said we need – he really definitely wants to end rough sleeping. And there was some suggestion that initiatives he'd undertaken in Manchester had a good effect.

[00:17:44] And I'd be interested to get your verdict on that. But also, there has been talk about having council house building again, the councils building houses. I mean, just give us your thoughts on those two things. Yes. So Manchester was one of the three pilots that they looked at in England. And of course, if we look across Britain, we can see examples where Scotland were already well ahead of the game in terms of housing-led approaches. And Wales also had a pilot and is looking as well at this sort of housing-first approach.

[00:18:13] There's been some evaluation on the Manchester pilot, as well as the ones in Liverpool and the West Midlands. But I think because attention has been focused on the fact that the mayor, the combined authority, is now our prime minister, there was some research that looked at whether or not it was indeed effective. And it was effective in terms of bringing down the numbers of rough sleepers. But what happens there is that you then increase the population in temporary accommodation.

[00:18:41] And if we want to solve homelessness, which includes people living in temporary accommodation, there's not a lot of point just moving people along a pipeline. And temporary accommodation, as we've just discussed, if that was in London, it would be extremely expensive. You know, there are places in Manchester that won't be terribly cheap on the housing market. But there is a real issue in looking at if you solve one bit of a leaky pipe in housing supply,

[00:19:10] you don't look at the whole thing. You are then just going to, you know, mend one hole and there's lots of homelessness or water in this analogy, just splurging out of other bits of disrepair. So the whole system needs looking at. And I think the only way to do that is by delivering sufficient social housing, whether that's by councils or by housing associations.

[00:19:36] But social rent is set using a government formula and it's based on relative local earnings as well as property values. And it's typically around the 50% mark. So I think there is an issue right now in terms of unfreezing housing benefit. So it matches the local market. That's been a real problem for families. But the longer term project is building council and housing association housing that is then let at social rent.

[00:20:06] But I mean, if I'm unemployed because I've been out on the streets, I mean, until I, you know, manage to pick myself up, I'm not going to have any money whatsoever. So apart from, I guess, you know, claiming the dole. So we need houses for those people as well. So irrespective of what the rent is, if you haven't got any money, you can't afford any rent. But there is that. And that's why in this country, we have got our welfare, our safety net.

[00:20:30] So we do have support for people who really don't have access to anything else. There are different elements of how a homelessness duty is undertaken by a local authority. So a family, people with vulnerable needs, medical issues are seen as in priority need. There is a different issue then.

[00:20:54] If you are a single person experiencing homelessness, you may not be seen in that priority bracket and therefore lower down the list in terms of being able to access permanent, affordable social housing. So the issue is looking at supply overall. And if we think that we've got those 1.34 million households on the local authority social housing waiting lists right now. Gosh, that is an extraordinary number, isn't it?

[00:21:24] I'm just thinking about that. If there's that level of need. It's a huge number. So there has, you know, there's been money announced. So there was the money that Andy Burnham announced in terms of rough sleeping. Prior to that, there was money that went with the affordable housing programme that was launched in December of last year already under the government.

[00:21:49] So there has been money available, but it's not sufficient still, even that over a five year period to deliver the pipeline of properly affordable housing that's needed. So various professional bodies have suggested we need a minimum of 90,000 houses built a year of which a significant, you know, a significant proportion need to be affordable and social. Well, I'm going to say affordable and social. I mean, because we've already said affordable is a very elastic term.

[00:22:17] But really, social housing is what we're talking about. Social housing is what's needed to fix the issue of people who cannot access housing in the local housing markets. But there is still an element that it's a mixed picture. So it's not one size fits all as a solution. So we need mixed housing markets. We need housing to buy, housing to rent, a good proportion of social, which is properly affordable housing rents.

[00:22:45] But there is also a market for thinking about affordable housing, which is up to 80% as well. But it needs to all be in the right mix according to the needs in the local and the national population. And is there a logical argument that says, in fact, for people, for homeless people who we're finding homes for, that we should develop facilities for them all to be together? Because, for example, they may not need a particularly big house.

[00:23:10] They may only need a couple of rooms, but they need some shared social space because they've been living on their own and they need to become more entwined with society. They also need, perhaps, psychiatric help. They need financial help. They need help getting jobs and all of those – and health services. All of those capabilities could be built in this one complex, in effect. Or is that dangerous to put all these people together? And, you know, is it better that they are more immersed in broader society?

[00:23:38] Well, it sounds like a hostel is what you're talking about, isn't it, in effect? Well, but a hostel, I mean, it's got bad connotations. I'm actually thinking of student accommodation, in fact, as the parallel. Because with student accommodation, students don't have a lot of room. They've got enough room to, you know, spend those few years. But they've got a lot of other capabilities around there as well. So I'm just wondering whether it's sort of like mirroring that sort of approach.

[00:24:07] Bedrooms or, you know, they've got, you know, in common – you know, I don't see it as being a place which feels permanent to anybody. So I'm talking about something which is permanent but has facilities close by as well. Because people have got this shared place in their life where they're all facing the same challenges for different reasons. But they've got the same challenges in terms of getting their life back on track. It speaks to what do we mean by home?

[00:24:32] So if we're trying to address homelessness as an issue as opposed to rooflessness, then some research I've done, it looked at six conditions of home. So one is security, that it's mine for as long as I need it or want it. Two, affordability of rent or the mortgage. Three is safety. So that's physical and mental, emotional safety. Four is around the quality of space, the right location.

[00:25:01] Number five is privacy, personal space, boundaries that you can shut people out. And six is connectedness. So not the opposite to privacy but linked to it. So they're able to be with other people, access, you know, areas in the community. So those are the six conditions I've had over a couple of decades of research actually. And the idea of shared accommodation for people experiencing homelessness,

[00:25:28] homelessness, it's not the solution in my mind. And I would just say the way that we narratively frame things, whether it's the politicians, whether it's in society, in the media, it's really important. So you asked the question, Phil, about how do we help solve the problem for homeless people? I would suggest that what we could do is reframe that and talk about people experiencing homelessness.

[00:25:56] So homelessness is a phenomenon that some people go through as opposed to a characteristic that might define a community of people. And when you think of it that way, that then helps to get to an answer which looks like private accommodation, a safe place that you can shut and lock the door and you know only you can let the people in that you want to. I'm not suggesting shared accommodation is wholly inappropriate all of the time.

[00:26:24] There are some brilliant move on types of accommodation. There are some brilliant spaces where you might get young mums who are sharing tips with one another after they've had their babies, these kind of things where you have got communities of experience or practice. But I think homelessness as a feature is not sufficient to think about developing communities. And that's not actually what I was talking about. I'm thinking of, for example, I'm in Sydney right now and just over the road, they're about

[00:26:49] to build a 70-story building which is going to house 450 households. And I've seen these shoot up in just a couple of years. I mean, everyone's got their own place. They've all got their own apartments with their own balconies. Yeah. But underneath it, you know, you have a lot of shops and health centres and all that sort of stuff. And just thinking if you said, well, okay, this building, maybe not quite as big as that because that's atrociously huge.

[00:27:15] But these buildings would be there to cater for these people going through this stage in their life and therefore have all of the ancillary services that's going to help them. Still got a safe space. It's still their space. There's a lot of other people that have got a shared background, which may or may not be a bad thing. I'm just thinking if we're going to tackle this issue and we're saying we need to build homes for people who are going through this stage in life, well, can we do it en masse? Because otherwise you're just trying to find gaps, aren't you?

[00:27:45] Places where you can add extra houses or extra homes, which takes a long time in the UK because of planning regulations. Absolutely. I think if you're talking about building housing at scale, utilising some of our brownfield sites, some of the infill sites in cities. Yeah. Absolutely. And let's build quickly. Let's use modern methods of construction. Let's make sure that these homes are environmentally sustainable, that they're close to places

[00:28:12] to go to school, get jobs, do shopping, go to a park. Absolutely. That sounds like a great idea. And Andy Burnham's two-pound buses just outside the front door. Would help as well. Joe, we've been talking in all this. It's been really interesting, but we've been talking in sort of statistical terms. Just give us an idea because you've experienced people in this situation a lot. You were talking about your experience in New York and I'm sure you've seen it other places.

[00:28:41] Just give us a kind of idea of what an individual, what might cause an individual, someone perhaps you've met, to be in this position in the first place. Because even though, as Phil said, we can imagine ourselves perhaps falling that way, what is he? Give us an idea, perhaps an example of someone who's fallen into this. Humanise it for us. Absolutely. I can do that. And I think there are multiple reasons why people might experience homelessness.

[00:29:07] And sometimes you hear, and sometimes it's helpful to hear, anyone can experience homelessness. And to a degree, that's true. You hear some people say, oh, anyone is a couple of paychecks away from homelessness. And in a way, that puts it on all of us and it makes it feel like nobody is different. Nobody is causing this for themselves. And that's helpful in one aspect.

[00:29:31] However, it's unhelpful in another because it stops us thinking about the societal conditions around that. So I came from a really stable family background. I hadn't moved a lot in my life. I had the support that was needed. If I stumbled, I had a family and a network around me to support. And not everyone has that. So that's something that comes out in a number of stories I've heard. And what I'll do is I'll just... Just give us one of those stories because it'd be really interesting. Yeah, I will. And it came from...

[00:30:01] I did a walk. I was president of my professional body, the Chartered Institute of Housing. And I did a very long walk. I did the coast path walk in the southwest. So 630 miles, one foot in front of the other over 46 days. And I had the opportunity to speak to people who in that area particularly were experiencing homelessness in rural areas. So that, again, is sometimes hidden when we think about the discourse of homelessness. We imagine it happening in a city.

[00:30:29] But it happens in the countryside as well. And there are various conditions, for example, in that area where there's tourism at play as well as the local economy. But I spoke to somebody, a young person, and I spoke to several young people who were part of a charity I was supporting, talking about the examples largely based around trauma that they had experienced in their young lives already. So uncertainty in a family environment.

[00:30:57] There might have been an element of, you know, aggression in the home. There were elements of not having that financial security. So the minute something happened, the minute rent couldn't be paid, there wasn't a family member who could help step in and say, here's some cash or come and stay with me. So the precarity, the cliff edge in those stories that I heard from young people in the southwest

[00:31:24] really brought it home that it's a very immediate problem because there's not that wide a network. So there are some heart-rending stories. And I don't want to pick out one particular set because, you know, it's private information, I guess. I don't want to retell it. Of course, of course. A lot of it. And that's why when we think about some of the solutions, it's really important to think about psychologically informed environments.

[00:31:53] So understanding that some of the individual histories into homelessness really do come from a place of deep trauma. And I don't know whether these figures are accurate or not. I got it from Inside Housing, their website. But it said in 2024, 1,600 people died while homeless in the UK in 2024. More than half were described as death of despair by despair. So in other words, suicide or drug overdose.

[00:32:21] So that's four people every day, basically. And that figure has been, I don't know whether they're exactly right. But I mean, I'd imagine that the figures are comparable to that. And they've been rising sharply as well. And that's just an horrific figure, isn't it? That people not only have found themselves in this situation, it's become so intolerable they decided they can't cope with it anymore. It's absolutely heart-wrenching, isn't it? It is.

[00:32:48] It's impossible to get your head around the fact that that is happening. And what's happened prior to that is possibly trying to access temporary accommodation, trying to deal with past trauma, trying to deal with health effects. A huge range of things have got to that particular point in time. And it is the absolute worst end to a situation where you hear figures like that. Inside Housing is an excellent publication.

[00:33:18] So they will have got those figures from government figures. So they'll be right. And it's just shocking that this is happening. What about also the issue of the fact that we have closed so many psychiatric wards and psychiatric hospitals as well? So another figure I've got here is 48 psychiatric beds or psychiatric places bare 100,000 people in 2013.

[00:33:46] That's now down to 34 by 2023. So that's a 30% drop. And yet we hear that mental disorders have been increasing. In fact, it doubled, I've got here, since 1990. One in four people in England have got poor mental health, according to the Mental Health Foundation. So that's rising. Number of mental health facilities to cope with that rising number is actually falling. So no wonder people are falling through the gaps. And it's not just the facilities for people to go to.

[00:34:15] It's the treatment that might happen as soon as someone's identified. We know that we've got a national health service and a social care service in crisis. When you couple that with the lack of sufficient, properly affordable housing available for people to have. When you've got issues that particularly our young generation, you know, those in the early 20s, looking at employment, looking at accessing affordable housing, all of that.

[00:34:45] And then you've got some of the mental health issues that you talk about. It's really disturbing. It's society. We need to wake up. We need our politicians to think cross-party, long-term, interdisciplinary. We can't have budgets just for social care, just for health, just for policing, just for housing. We have to think almost like an infrastructure project. I know you were talking about the railways last week on your podcast.

[00:35:13] We need to think almost like that. Connect the dots literally and think, how do we create a home for people to live that makes them well? Andy Burnham talked about wellness and hope. A good life, I think he talked about. How do we do that? Well, we do need sufficient funding. We need politicians to think about this being an investment. So I know it's a cost, but we've already talked about the savings that could be made.

[00:35:42] But we don't want to treat the symptoms of having an issue of homelessness. We want to deal with the causes. And that spans across housing, health, social care, and the rest of the public services. And indeed transport, as we heard. It's exactly mentioned last week. Well, Joe, it's... But we have to do a better job on this than we have in the railways. And much else besides. I mean, Joe, it's interesting. You've got a clarion call there to what Andy Burnham says he will do something.

[00:36:12] He's been talking about social care, of course, and other things. But as you say, getting it joined up is... I mean, that's a very, very full-on home. But you know those people who say, oh, well, it's all costing too much. Those people, for example, we know we can't tax the rich because we don't want to because we're rich. We don't want to get taxed. But those people, we've got to say to those people, okay, so what about the four people every day whose life has got so bad living on the streets that they have killed themselves?

[00:36:38] Are you happy to hang on to your money while that's the situation that's being faced every day? I'm hitting with a conscience. I don't think that's going to make much difference. It's such a huge issue, isn't it? But this is what government is for. It's collecting our social conscience. It's helping us to think about grand-scale, long-term issues.

[00:36:59] It's unfortunate that we do think in political cycles that politicians do come out with sort of clickbait, soundbite, things that are going to attract attention for the next election. It would be lovely if we could elevate the social conversation and genuinely think, okay, what does the next 20 years look like in terms of funding? How we live well with hope, and that's done with home as the absolute foundation. I know.

[00:37:27] We're doing that because once they've got a home and they can get a job, then the mental problems go away because they have more self-worth. They've got that stability. So, therefore, there's less need for the support services for mental health disorders because they'll be controlled as well because you're giving people safety. And that's all we want at the end of the day. And they'll pay tax when they start working as well. It's like covering the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, isn't it? You've got your shelter.

[00:37:53] Well, we've gone through all this from housing to sorting society out generally, and maybe that's the point, really, exactly as you say, Joe. Thank you so much for taking us through that. It's very – it's both optimistic and pessimistic, I suppose, just depending on whether politicians are listening to this and talking about it. But it's quite simplistic as well, isn't it? Just build more bloody homes, pure and simple. Life would be easier. That's certainly the start point. Build more properly affordable homes. Home is foundational.

[00:38:23] And I would say that there is hope. I think we should hope. If we don't hope, then this whole elevation of it is a big issue that we can solve. It becomes a crisis and people lose faith. We have to have that hope. We can do it. We can fix this. We know what works. It takes that longer-term government prioritisation as key to taking this forward. A good note to end on. Thank you so much, Joe. Really good to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[00:38:52] And look, next week, this is going to be an interesting one, Mr. Infantino with his attempts to try and, in effect, privatise the – well, I mean, it is a commercial organisation anyway. Well, that's the point, isn't it, really? The World Cup. I mean, you know, it is – the World Cup, you know, it's been about money. We know that. There's been a lot of outrage and whether Mr. Infantino will still be in post by the time we talk about this next week will be interesting to see. But more generally, you know, are we just banging our heads against a brick wall? It's commercial.

[00:39:18] People make money out of it, whether it's the Premier League, the World Cup or darts or golf or tennis. It just seemed like one step too far, didn't it, after we all had those refreshment breaks, which just coincidentally got filled with TV commercials. Yes, absolutely. And it was obviously driven by the need to look after the players rather than making money from those ads. It was just fortuitous. Of course it was. To the advertisers that that happened.

[00:39:44] So just having had that and then him basically saying, yes, well, now let's hive off a chunk of the World Cup so that investors can make money out of it. I don't know. I just can't see why everyone, I mean, I'm not that interested in sports, as you know, Phil, but I just think this is all commercial anyway. Why this particular bit has to be somehow more pure, it seems absurd. Yeah, I'll tell you why.

[00:40:09] Because there's a difference between the World Cup being organised so that the World Cup takes place and they make money to support running that cup plus all the other services that they provide in terms of helping youth clubs and all that sort of stuff. So all the good stuff they do. They are basically going out, raising that money. It's all coming back to them. The moment you get a, you in effect hive it off.

[00:40:34] You're saying, right, okay, so another body can come in, organise all of that and take a chunk of that money for themselves. So that's not going back into the sport. That's going back to the investors. Yeah, but we know that, who made the most money out of the World Cup? It wasn't, you know, it's not little football clubs in Rio de Janeiro or something. It's people who advertised. It's people who sponsored. You know, that's where the money really is. So, you know, you're kidding yourself. Well, I mean, the advertisers paid. They didn't make money from it. They paid into it. Well, they did because people bought stuff that they saw.

[00:41:04] You know, it's all that. It's a generational thing. And FIFA itself is absolutely rolling in money. But, yeah, but then having another organisation coming along and saying, well, we're going to raise the money now. So here's a body that's been set up to represent the game of football. And we're just going to sell that to somebody else. And they're going to make the money. And not pass that money on to feather the sport. I think that's what got that. Anyway, we can talk about it.

[00:41:32] I think it's a chimera, but then I'm sure I'm in the minority. There is a lot of commercialisation in sport. And you do wonder whether it's for the good of the sport. Absolutely. So we'll look at that. It's a show. It's a show. We'll talk about all that and argue about it by the sound of it next week. Yeah. On the Y curve. We'll see you then. Thanks for joining us today. The Y. Curve.