It’s time to finally act on out-dated vagrancy laws
I’M a retired pub quizzer. Specialist topics: cricket, politics, local government, and esoterica, or weird stuff.
The latter included knowing England’s oldest written law still in force is not Magna Carta, whose surviving bits date not from the 1215 original, but from Edward I’s 1297 revision. Trick question!
Oldest law, therefore, is the 1267 Distress Act, forbidding someone seeking compensation for debt non-repayment other than through the law courts. Sound principle, no fundamental revision required. I get it.
However, the still extremely in-force 1824 Vagrancy Act, making it a criminal offence to beg, sleep rough or be homeless on the street in England and Wales, is very different. It’s a bummer of a law, in several senses, and should have been repealed long ago – as in Scotland in 1982, years before they even got their own Parliament.
Evidently, though, repealing even centuries-old legislation is harder than you’d think. From 1824 alone, the Weights and Measures Act survives widespread international metrication.
And, despite our having an at least framework Modern Slavery Act, the 1824 Slave Trade Act similarly lives on.
Clearly, judging from (see the neat word choice?) the nearly 4,400 laws on the so-called Statute Book since 1800 alone, our legislators find it considerably easier to add new ones than to repeal oldies.
Which is depressing enough in principle.
But this ancient, deliberately loosely defined Vagrancy Act pre-dates both the police service and the 1832 Great Reform Act – and so was passed by a Parliament in which cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield had not one MP between them.
Requiring it today to address issues such as domestic violence, mental ill-health, substance abuse, and, certainly when the eviction moratorium expires, post-pandemic homelessness, well, it literally beggars belief.
You get the Vagrancy Act’s drift from its full title: “An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds”.
Yeah, rogues and vagabonds, begging and homeless, let’s criminalise and lock ‘em up.
The targeted ‘vagrants’ were partly the ‘undesirable’ Scots and Irish, but primarily the many ex-servicemen, who, discharged after fighting for their country in the Napoleonic
Wars, couldn’t find jobs and accommodation and so used their injuries to seek food, money or shelter. They had to be stopped.
There weren’t many council-run night shelters around, and the Crisis homeless charity was still 140 years away.
Times do change, though, and our attitudes – don’t they?
Not always, apparently. Remember the last big Windsor Castle event
– the Harry and Meghan wedding – and the keenness of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Council’s then leader, one Simon Dudley, for the police to use their 1824 powers against the “epidemic of rough sleeping and vagrancy, aggressive begging and intimidation”?
His council apparently had evidence that “large numbers of adults begging in Windsor are not in fact homeless… homelessness
amongst this group is a voluntary choice”. So, clear the area and get those homeless people out of Royal sight before the big day.
To their credit, Thames Valley police made clear that in their experience such legal action was ineffective – and generally recent statistical trends in prosecutions and convictions under the 1824 Act suggest this view is increasingly widely shared: that the most appropriate responses involve ‘outreach’ services linking rough sleepers to suitable accommodation and support.
England and Wales prosecutions for begging – sorry, “gathering money for alms” – down from 2,219 in 2014 to 926 in 2019; convictions too down by over half.
West Midlands stats are similar: though rough sleeping increased, Vagrancy Act arrests fell from 189 in 2016/17 to 58 in 2019/20.
And yes, few modern-day convictions result in custody, but rather a fine or conditional discharge.
The fact remains, though, that these statistical changes result from interpretations – by individual police forces, police and crime commissioners, and ultimately individual police officers – of imprecisely defined behaviours rooted in an antiquated criminal law.
None of this is news, and recent years have seen several promising initiatives.
Thanks substantially to then Communities Secretary, James Brokenshire, the May Government launched in 2018 a rough sleeping strategy, aimed at halving rough sleeping in the current parliament (which would end in 2019!) and ending it “for good” by 2027.
The Strategy comprised some 61 commitments, but no mention of the 1824 Act. So, not to be outdone, Jeremy Corbyn pledged Labour to repeal said Act.
Brokenshire’s successor, Robert Jenrick, gave little indication of having heard of the Act, until, faced with a Commons homelessness debate last January, he announced “we are reviewing the Act … and want to see it changed.”
Then this February, after barely a further year’s reviewing, and responding to a question from Nickie Aiken – former Westminster Council Leader, now the borough’s Conservative MP and strong Vagrancy Act abolitionist – Jenrick too reckoned it should be “consigned to history”.
But almost certainly not, he later revealed, until at least the new parliamentary session in the autumn.
The impatient Aiken, by contrast, as she informed a Westminster Hall debate last Friday, already has a Bill and Crisis-drafted programme with cross-party support and sounding far ‘oven-readier’ than ever the PM’s Brexit deal was.
Replace criminal penalties with support services for the ‘hard core’ of rough sleepers: a completely changed approach placing preservation of life at its core through ‘assertive outreach’, alongside social care and specialist medical support, all attached to the safety of a bed. Proper funding required, obviously, but it’s hardly magic.
Requiring the 1824 Vagrancy Act today, well, it literally beggars belief...