The royal wedding could be a way for Windsor to fix its homelessness issues, rather than locking people up

Simon Dudley’s call for homeless people to be cleared from Windsor before the royal wedding misses the opportunity to do something positive about homelessness. Councils are increasingly taking a harsh and punishing attitude to vulnerable people, with the homeless one of the worst-treated groups. In 2015 Hackney Council proposed a rough-sleeper “ban” that would levy heavy, and ultimately unpayable, fines on those caught sleeping out. Fifty-four towns and cities in the UK have adopted similarly vicious local policies, such as those that resulted in a man being fined £105 after a child dropped £2 onto his sleeping bag.

After nearly eight years of cuts to welfare, social housing, and charities supporting people, there is a mood to take action on homelessness. This Christmas, Shelter estimated that 78,000 households (including 120,000 children) were living in temporary housing, 9,000 were on the streets and a further 9,000 were living in tents, cars and buses. On top of this are the large number of mainly young people who are “sofa-surfing”, crashing with friends and acquaintances because they have nowhere else to go. Over two in five young people have had to do this. Recent polling found nearly half of adults in the UK believe homelessness is the biggest issue facing housing.

The new Homelessness Reduction Act will make a difference, if the results of similar legislation in Wales play out in the same way in England. But the £550m funding to make it happen is tiny compared to the estimated £27bn in welfare cuts from 2010 to 2020. Spending on building new social housing more than halved, from £11bn in 2009 to just £5bn in 2015.

The royal wedding could be a way for Windsor to fix its homelessness issues, rather than locking people up. Building enough homes in a locality to house homeless people is possible. York’s 58 homeless families could be housed for £4.6m, one twenty-fifth of the £110m bonus paid to local housing magnate, Jeff Fairburn. It is possible even for street-based homeless people. The “Housing First” approach of getting homeless people into housing, rather than requiring them to be free of addiction, is something that has worked in the US and is now being tried in the UK. Local charity the Windsor Homeless Project says it supports around 50-60 people, so not a dissimilar number to York.

When Prince William and Kate Middleton got married in 2011 they raised over £1m for 26 different charities. What if instead, this time the donations to the Royal Wedding Charitable Gift Fund go to a single cause in a single place? Government could kick in a few tens of millions instead of buying a royal yacht, and maybe Jeff Fairburn could put in the rest?

Tackling homelessness would reflect some of the charity work Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have done themselves. Prince Harry is known for his work on mental ill-health, which affects 80 per cent of homeless people; Prince William, Kate Middleton and Prince Harry’s Royal Foundation works on mental health, addiction and vulnerable youth. Meghan Markle has written about the work to support women and girls who cannot access sanitary products, something that the Homeless Period has been working on in the UK, and on the plight of refugees through her work with the UN.

Given that we have a monarchy, maybe we should start to see the royal wedding as we would the Olympics or another grand event, as a chance to create a lasting legacy for a community. Ending homelessness in Windsor could be that legacy and something you would hope local politicians would be proud of.