Labour’s Angela Rayner has announced that the 1824 Vagrancy Act is to be repealed, decriminalising rough sleeping for the first time in 200 years. The reflex reaction from the Right-wing press has been to raise the spectre of proliferating homeless encampments springing up everywhere, while linking this to the type of endemic tent cities seen in progressive American cities such as San Francisco.

So is this the “loony Left” at work? Is Labour hell-bent, out of some unfathomable animus toward ordinary British people, on fast-tracking tent cities nationwide? It would be easier, from my point of view, to rant along these lines about progressive lawlessness; but as is often the case in today’s hyper-partisan news reporting, there’s a bit more to the story. And a closer look suggests first that far from being “loony Leftism”, the repeal is emphatically cross-party — but also that this consensus has failed in other ways to keep up with the changing face of homelessness in Britain, and with its overall relation to the social contract.

The Vagrancy Act itself has long been targeted for repeal by homelessness charities and campaigners. It was first passed in 1824, in response to a rise in begging and rough sleeping following the Napoleonic War and enclosure of the agricultural commons. The highly localist, parish-based welfare system of the time was ill-equipped to cope with this newly-mobile population; facing destitution, homeless military veterans and displaced countryfolk thronged to the cities, where they set up camp on the streets. In response, Sir William Peel campaigned successfully to criminalise begging, rough sleeping, and other “vagrancy” offences — effectively addressing large-scale social disruption by blaming its negative side-effects on the people worst impacted.

More recently, though, even Right-wing politicians have come to view this approach as a bit harsh. Broadly speaking, the general view in Britain today is that homelessness is a result of economic misfortune plus (perhaps) issues related to addiction and mental health. In line with Britain’s overall emphasis on social solidarity and welfare, the punitive Peelite approach is now deprecated across the board. Thus (a detail downplayed in the Telegraph’s reporting) it transpires that the decision to repeal the Vagrancy Act in fact came from the Tories, who consulted in 2022 on replacing it with provisions geared toward support and shelter.

So Starmer is really just continuing what the Tories began. And while it’s possible that Labour will produce some kind of analogue to the judgement-free official approach that gave rise to San Francisco’s tent cities, it’s also possible that this comparison is mistaken. Not because California-style Leftism is a good idea, but simply because the demographics in question are different here.

San Francisco’s tent cities were notoriously linked to the city’s “harm reduction” drug policies, which attracted addicts from less easygoing jurisdictions all over the US to California’s less rigorous regime. By contrast with America, the British population is relatively small and unlikely to produce enough addicts to form encampments on the scale that so scandalised America’s conservative press when they emerged in San Francisco.

What Britain does have in abundance, though, much as in Dublin or Paris, is tent-dwelling illegal and semi-legal migrants. In recent years the absolute number of rough sleepers in Britain has grown sharply, largely driven by migration: a growing proportion are refugees, and London homelessness charities report recent changes to Home Office asylum policy have swelled the proportion from Africa and Asia. But contemporary public debate on rough sleeping has yet to take this significant change into account. Rather, today’s received view on compassionate rough sleeping policy still seems tacitly premised on an assumption that homeless people are part of the overall national community, just down on their luck.

Does this still apply, though, if as much as 48%, or more of rough sleepers are from overseas? Should policy change? What, if anything, do British taxpayers owe to street sleepers who aren’t fellow citizens? Is it wrong even to ask this question? Even mainstream conservatives still seem to be reacting to Rayner’s Vagrancy Act announcement as though Britain’s rough sleepers are the same composition as ever. But this is not the case. Rather, a version of the displacement that prompted Peel’s Vagrancy Act seems to be under way today — just, this time, internationally. Much as in Peel’s day, existing welfare systems are ill-equipped to cope. And once this enters the public consciousness, we may find that support for an empathic, solidaristic, national welfare-based approach begins to fray. Perhaps, even, in favour of revisiting the brusquer approach taken by William Peel.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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