Ritchie’s written a law

(6) Each local authority in England and Wales is required to inform the Secretary of State by 1 January each year of:

The number of homeless persons residing in its area; and

Anyone else spot a slight problem there?

Further. It sez the Sec State must build enough housing to eliminate homelessness. OK, so, there are circa 5,000 rough sleepers out there. Build 5,000 houses and we’re done, right?

Hmm, what, that doesn’t solve homelessness? Then it’s not a shortage of housing that’s causing homelessness, is it?

39 thoughts on “Ritchie’s written a law”

  1. Oh, and you know it’s quite tricky, with most templates, to change the WordPress (seems to be) permanent link. Fist typing, again:

    Compare the actual “yearc-publish-a-scoial-housing-plan-seeti” with a putative “year-publish-a-social-housing-plan-settin” link.

  2. Minister: The Guardian has run a piece on uncaring government allowing homeless people to starve and die on the streets, and the Opposition are hammering me in the House. What shall I do?

    Sir Humphrey (for it is he): Never mind, Minister! We shall draft a bill which will provide a complete answer to any Opposition attacks. It will require Local Authorities to determine the number of homeless in their area, and build sufficient houses to home them.

    Minister: Will that solve the homeless problem?

    Sir Humphrey: Of course not, Minister! The homeless problem is intractable. But it will solve YOUR problem, which is that the Opposition are attacking you on it. The worst problems are in Local Authority areas controlled by Opposition parties, and this means that they cannot raise the issue without admitting that they cannot solve it either….

  3. Drink, drugs and mental trouble are the cause of rough sleeping. Apart from new young runaways the vast maj of rough sleepers have been offered –and most have had –accommodation given They don’t want it or can’t get along with the others in the home/hostel etc.

    Murf is peddling the cheap cod compassion of the Left. Their solution –once they have the power they seek–would be jail or murder depending on how far gone their leaders are.

  4. Funny, legislators usually have no trouble with outlawing unwanted behaviour. In instances where this IS behaviour and not mere misfortune, appropriate laws should be applied. Laws we already have.

  5. This would be a good idea if we added:

    * How many of those “homeless” are foreign nationals

    * How many are driven to “work” every day by their Romanian gypsy gangmasters

  6. Per google maps there appears to be a large vacant strip of land adjacent to kingsley walk ely that seems ripe for housing.

  7. Speaking of fist typing, headline on the Guardian website

    “Carlos Ghosn: Japan issues Interpol wanted notice for ex-Nissan box”


  8. Note the “by 1st January” which will require the relevant official in each local authority to work on a Bank Holiday.
    “Sufficient funds” – Nil in most cases, the LA has lots of funds which cooses to use for other things

  9. Local authorities have for many years been providing government with rough sleepers count – its how the official figures of rough sleepers is calculated.

    Our local authority did eventually provide a list of places they checked. Bearing in mind they cannot enter buildings, cannot climb into skips, cannot check tents.
    They looked at the side of certain buildings, they looked at one of the busiest road junctions in the borough and they looked outside a certain car park.

    Some local authorities make darn sure they don’t have homeless every year. Some places find one or two.

    So dead easy for local authorities to make sure they have the housing to meet official count figures.
    Reality is rather higher numbers and providing a house does not resolve the problem – some of our local homeless have been given houses several times. Still homeless today.
    Still, providing a house is such a nice simple solution. Pity its incorrect as a solution but that doesn’t matter.

  10. Here is a section of that proposed law per the website:

    “an estimate of the cost of buying empry property and land to needed to meet the needs of homeless persons in the area..”

    Anyone know what an empry property is?

    ‘land to needed to meet”?


    They can’t even be bothered to proof read their proposed new law.

  11. @ Andrew C
    An empry property is one that is owned by the NHS and has been left unused to rot for a decade or more. An example is the old Workhouse at the end of the road I used to live in which was turned into a Geriatric hospital for some years and then left empty for about twenty years. Eventually sold to s developer who converted it into a score or more of expensive flats.

  12. Pretty much anytime I’ve come across a measure or KPI for a specific date/time there’s someone gaming the numbers, e.g. everything pushed out to production for the count then load of stuff pulled back into maintenance 30mins later.
    Usually some fun to be had by suggesting as they always hit that target maybe we should be measuring something else and seeing who starts to complain.

  13. Bloke in North Dorset

    We need to be very careful when discussing this subject because there’s nothing the left likes more than to bait and switch by firstly discussing rough sleepers and then referring to them as homeless and then referring to all homeless in the same breath.

    For example, Martin discussed rough sleepers above, whereas that bill refers to homelessness in the widest sense. It even wants to declare people as homeless if they voluntarily change jobs for lower pay, maybe to relief stress or get more free time, and it takes them below a certain percentage of the rent, which hasn’t been defined. That would be a great way to get social housing.

  14. A total of 5,000 homeless people in the entire country? Just repurpose a disused army base somewhere. Bingo, problem solved.

  15. I actually managed to engage a Corbynite in a discussion on this before the election. Apparently a vote for Jeremy Corbyn would have ended homelessness at a stroke.

    Corbynite:’ If you care about the homeless you have to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’

    VP: ‘ Ok, so assuming he can magically ‘end homelessness’ how would that practically be accomplished. Actual steps you could take?’

    Corbynite: ‘We could repossess all the empty houses you see in Central London’

    VP: ‘We certainly could. Albeit you might want to consider summoning the ambassadors of China, Singapore, the UAE and Saudi Arabia (to name only four) to explain why the government has seen fit to expropriate assets brought by their subjects in apparently good faith and also to consider what reprisals we can expect?’

    Corbynite: ‘What are you talking about?’

    VP: ‘Almost all that housing is owned by either institutions or Foreign nationals – you want to cause asset fire sales and diplomatic incidents, go ahead’

    Corbynite falls silent.

    VP: ‘Furthermore, what message are you sending to some guy working the minimum wage in Hounslow or Croydon – if he’d only moved to the streets he could have swapped his bedsit in Thornton Heath for a palace in Knightsbridge?’

    Corbynite throws drink but VP evades skilfully.

    The Corbynites are ignorant of many subjects but rarely is their stupidity more evident than on the subject of homelessness – just brain dead….

  16. Stage 1: sell your property, become homeless
    Stage 2: get given free house under Ritchie’s law
    Stage 3: …
    Stage 4: Profit!

  17. The key areas for rough sleeping — that is the actual homeless — is always centres of big cities.

    Precisely the areas that cannot build housing.

  18. I’m a nasty piece of work. Like Ayn Rand, but with an actual penis. I loathe the welfare state. I think charity is a private matter and should not be over-indulged, even privately.

    But even I know, as longtime denizens of this here blog may recall, that unless you’re willing forcibly to remove a rough sleeper to sheltered accommodation, in other words to kidnap them and then imprison them, you literally cannot solve ‘homelessness’.

    Lacking some common sense, as I do, I learned this by, heartless brute that I am, actually trying to befriend with a view to housing her, an old gal living on the pavements near me. I learned I couldn’t just kidnap her. Duh.

    But here’s the thing: if I, as a minarchist loather of the welfare state, know this, nearly 15 years’ the Tuber’s junior, why does he not?

    Surely it cannot be that he’s not even tried to lead by example?

  19. A few people point out that homelessness has a variety of causes. But no one seems to commission studies to find out what these are, and then propose policies which would deal with each of the actual causes.

    I suspect that there will be a small number of people who actually like the life of living out on the streets and being supported by charity, with no responsibilities. If we could find a way of handling these people in a socially accepted way I suspect that the homeless problem would become a lot easier to deal with…

  20. @Mr Ecks January 2, 2020 at 1:07 pm

    Plus Romanian immigrant criminal begging & thieving families


    Thanks, signed

  21. There was a rough sleeper in a doorway in my market town centre. She (and her sleeping bag, carrier bags and cardboard windshields) stank of piss, shit, sweat and rotting food. It took 8 months to get her moved on, because this was her chosen lifestyle. Police, social services, outreach workers from the local hostel and local councillors all said: “it’s a multi-agency problem, so…”. I offered to remove her stinking kit, and also to tip a bucket of cold water over her, but I was told that I could be prosecuted if I did either.

  22. Yeah, everyone tells me that some of the “homeless” sleep outdoors by choice – but there are some who do not and we should not ignore them just because the lefties scream about false numbers. What we really should do is provide shelter for those who need it without wasting stuff on those who do not want it.
    Apparently Glasgow has night shelters for homeless men but not for homeless women: my sister and brother-in-law are helping a charity that provides temporary accommodation for female refugees rendered homeless, usually as a consequence of the incompetence of the DWP.
    There are also, M’Lud, deserving cases



    So, you are saying the state should provide better for those that the state has failed to provide for? If so, that’s a remarkable example of begging the question.

    If not, then you’ll not find many here is disagreement — private charity can, and often does, do a better job than the state.

  24. Even John Major had enough sense to declare that there will always be homeless people as for some it is a result of choice and life decisions and the best you could do was outreach to help them when needed

  25. @ Chester Draws
    You are assuming a contradiction in terms which I did not make. Local (usually small) charities address problems ignored (occasionally created) by the state. Of course I think that the state should cure its incompetence and abandon its assumption that whenever a couple split up it is always the man who becomes homeless.although he is usually the one paying the rent/mortgage.

  26. Brilliant by m’Lud and VP
    The perverse incentive to ditch a room in a HMO in Thornton Heath – the worst part of CR presumably – quality

  27. Stage 1: sell your property, become homeless
    Stage 2: get given free house under Ritchie’s law
    Stage 3: …
    Stage 4: Profit!

    More like:

    Stage 3: discover you are now classed as wealthy, and subject to a massive tax bill from the marxist government
    Stage 4: go to stage 1

  28. Bongo

    Thornton Heath was memorably described by one of the many fabulous contributors here as ‘Dante’s eighth circle of hell’

    Haven’t been there myself in a while but last time I drove through saw a carjacking and two vehicles being hotwired at 8 in the evening – let’s just say the perpetrators were ‘not of the caucasian persuasion’ a temple for ‘diversity efforts’ certainly…

  29. John77 – tends to be considerably easier to rehome a homeless woman than a homeless man.
    Back when I worked for a homeless charity the council would find a woman a flat or house within 2 or 3 days. For the guys 8 months was not uncommon – so far down the waiting list it was annoying. And got bumped by every female and every family.
    Single guys are not a priority when everyone else is.

    The women found it a lot easier to get a night sleeping at someone else’s place plus the churches found it easier to get a female to house a female for a few nights than a male.

    I can only think of a couple of females long term homeless – and they both avoided night shelters due to bad experiences. Set one up they’d avoid it – so in our town we never set up a female only night shelter.

  30. @ Martin
    Yes, that is quite true – but Glasgow is different: population of about 1 million and a disproportionate number of genuine refugees because the Home Office sends asylum seekers to places where there is surplus of housing, putting them in accommodation that the locals don’t want. If DWP messes up so they cannot pay the rent they get evicted. So there is a need that the churches try to meet but do not always succeed.

  31. @ Pcar
    You guess wrong in the cases of which I have heard details. Some escapees from DRC (Congo), some Kurdish refugees, a few (very few) of Cameron’s direct imports from refugee camps ….
    What makes you imagine that economic migrants jumping on lorries from Calais would stay in Glasgow of all places? Those types quietly disappear into the black economy in the south-east of England.
    A lot of refugees were dumped in a local authority tower block visible (a couple of miles) from my sister’s house – because the locals wouldn’t live there – until it was blown down (explosively demolished) on the grounds that it could not be brought up to modern minimum standards, then rehoused with private landlords who expected the rent to be paid whether or not the DWP paid on time.
    I am angered, whenever I think about it, by Brown’s decree that refugees couldn’t take paid jobs that only affected genuine refugees not the economic migrants he wanted to discourage who just used fake ID to get round it.

  32. @john77

    How many safe countries did Kurds and DRCs pass through before arriving in UK?

    Why did they not claim asylum there?

    The ‘refugees’ are economic migrants

  33. @ Pcar
    Direct flight from Kinhasa flies over not through.
    Turkey is not a safe country for Kurds – those who do not support PKK get attacked by both PKK and parts of the police who assume that they do support PKK. Kurds fleeing ISIS enter an unsafe country. Again you can get a direct flight.
    If you would care to re-read my previous post and ask yourself why any economic migrant would choose to accept being dumped in a vacant local authority flat in Glasgow (vacant because Glaswegians don’t want it despite rent being subsidised out of council tax receipts) rather than disappearing into the black economy in the south-east of England. The Grauniad claims that half the undocumented immigrants live in London.

  34. @john77

    Direct flight from Kinhasa flies over not through.


    You’ve answered your own question. Life, due to money given, even in Glasgow, is better than others they could have claimed asylum in.

    Why? Overly generous benefits and charities for ‘refugees’ naive do-gooders. As evidenced by Calais, France, EU ‘refugee’ debacle/farce

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