EARLY CAREER FEATURE

No One Left Out? The Antinomies of Community

Introduction
The recently published fifteen point action plan – No One Left Out: Communities Ending Rough Sleeping (CLG 2008) – outlines the government’s new strategy to eradicate the phenomenon by the symbolic date of the London Olympics of 2012. This renewed policy focus aims to build on the successful post-1998 prevention and reduction programmes (Pawson, 2007) as exemplified by figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government that suggest 483 people sleep rough across England on any given night, a sustained reduction of two thirds from 1,850 in 1997.

Underpinning this new strategic vision is a funding stream totalling £200 million together with the declaration that ‘‘charities, businesses and government will work more closely in new and innovative ways to help rough sleepers off the street and into employment’’ (CLG 2008:18). Here, then, we see how the idea of ‘community’ (refracted through a mixed economy of welfare) has been given a determining role in the drive to prevent and alleviate visible rough sleeping. However, notwithstanding some positive developments, I would argue that the eulogisation of ‘community’ proffered by No One Left Out: Communities Ending Rough Sleeping is profoundly narrow and distorting. In talking about empowering people and communities there is a serious neglect of the catastrophic consequences of the current economic crisis and, in a similar light, the chronic shortage of decent, affordable, secure and accountable council housing.

A close reading of No One Left Out: Communities Ending Rough Sleeping requires us to draw attention to a new politics of community and responsible citizenship. Here again the emphasis on community is indicative of the New Labour government’s efforts to facilitate community cohesion and foster – and in some instances coerce – individuals and their communities to become active in their own governance. It is also important to acknowledge that the responsibility for planning and purchasing homelessness services has increasingly been devolved from national to local government. Not only does this necessitate a recognition that homelessness organisations now compete for increased (but short-term funds) but that this development has also transformed the culture of the homelessness sector and its ability to be a genuinely independent and critical voice within civil society. In this regard, homelessness charities, traditionally viewed as a sphere outside of the state, now find themselves engaged in various types of ‘compacts’ with both the state and the business community. This has had the effect of redrawing the boundaries between the charitable voluntary sector and the state.

While opening up to scrutiny the valorisation of community and faith based groups, we need also to be alert to the ‘punitive community’ (Moore, 2008). One reading of this is reflected in the more authoritarian elements of New Labour as illustrated by its preoccupation with worklessness and its aggressive approach to curbing anti-social behaviour. Under these circumstances it is the specific responsibility of ‘active citizens’ to police themselves, monitor their neighbours and reinforce responsibility. In line with the demands and expectations of leading community actors, homelessness service providers are enjoined to place a stronger emphasis on group conduct and personal change. Yet at the same time ‘recalcitrant’ support services are subject to growing moral regulation and administrative oversight. In this way homelessness services that consciously and courageously question the contemporary governance of homelessness are deemed to be intractable as much as conservative.

To be clear, the argument posited here is not that charitable voluntary activity or burgeoning third sector involvement - often guided by a strong moral framework that advocates social justice – does not and cannot play a significant role in recognising and responding to the particular needs of rough sleepers within their communities. This is clearly not the case. Certainly, it is well known and routinely remarked upon that amateur community voluntarism has emerged in order to tackle shortages in welfare provision that (local and central) government is unable, or unwilling, to provide.

Background
In the brief discussion that follows I draw on a doctoral research project underpinned by extensive ethnographic fieldwork with rough sleepers and the precariously housed in a small market town in Dorset. It looks in particular at some of the ways in which the twin movements of conditionality and responsibilisation have gained a narrative force and institutional purchase in relation to the conduct of homeless people.

The Punitive Community
Three issues have particular salience for the discussion here. The first is to suggest that the concept of ‘community’ has particular implications for how rough sleeping is both conceived and potentially resolved. In empirical terms, my study highlights how homelessness as an issue can be discursively transformed – from latency (something other than homelessness) to visibility (vilified and problematised) - within the context of a small rural environment (Cloke et al., 2003). Again this example highlights how efforts are made to ‘export’ homeless people on the spurious grounds that they have no ‘local connection’ or simply because there is no emergency accommodation in the immediate area. In the second case my stock of ethnographic fieldwork material would seem to suggest that the deployment of anti-social behaviour orders, specifically the use and threat of Dispersal Orders against rough sleepers has been made possible by the grammar of ‘community safety.’ The third and final issue here relates to some of the ways in which an engaged (moral) community can regulate or exercise control over services to homeless and destitute people. This point is reinforced by my own direct observations at a small, voluntary organisation that despite appearing to be a modal carrier for the type of ‘community involvement’ so lauded by New Labour (Law & Mooney, 2006) has been compelled to alter its (1) physical structure; (2) admission policy; (3) restrict the number of service users able to access the project; and (4) institute a payment system for a hot meal service in order to cultivate ‘personal responsibility’.

Conclusion
In this modest review, I have set to throw an arc of light of some of the tensions inherent in the way in which the idea of ‘community’ has been constructed as a panacea to deeply entrenched and preduring street homelessness. There can be no doubt, though, that the critical campaign to end rough sleeping must continue apace. If that progressive promise is to be realised it must be based on an authentic vision of social justice not political expediency or the inner contradictions of the 2012 Olympic project.

Martin Whiteford, PhD Student
School of Health & Social Care, Bournemouth University

References
Cloke, P., Milbourne, P. & Widdowfield, R. (2003) The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England, Geoforum, Vol. 34 Issue (1) pp. 21 -35.

Communities and Local Government (2008) No One Left Out - Communities Ending Rough Sleeping, Wetherby: Department for Communities and Local Government Publications.

Law, A. & Mooney, G. (2006) Social Capital and Neo-Liberal Voluntarism, Variant 26 Summer, Available at http://www.variant.randomstate.org/26texts/LawMooney26.html

Moore, S. (2008) Neighbourhood Policing and the Punitive Community, Crime Prevention and Community Safety, Vol. 10 Issue (3) pp. 190 – 202.

Pawson, H. (2007) Local Authority Homelessness Prevention in England: Empowering Consumers or Denying Rights? Housing Studies, Vol. 22 No. (6) pp. 867 – 884.