It’s right that we should celebrate the eventual end of the Vagrancy Act (1824), finally kicked into the sea on 29 June this year – 2026.

Even at its inception, the law was criticised for criminalising poverty. Wikipedia tells us the law was brought in to “combat the increasing number of people forced to live on the streets due to the conclusion of the Napoleonic War and the social effects of the Industrial Revolution”.

So, they knew people weren’t choosing to engage in unlawful activity, but they criminalised it anyway. The act was intended to deem every person convicted as a “rogue or vagabond” and presumably other Dungeons and Dragons classes in its thorough list of people presumed to be guilty of something.

Even at the time this list included “every person… under the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of sustenance and not giving a good account of himself or herself”, which would have particularly pleased Suella Braverman, who lost her job for banging on about promising to crack down on homeless people living in tents as a “lifestyle choice”.

So, this reactionary, thoughtless legislation would be familiar to anyone transported 202 years into the future, where you can be imprisoned for protesting about climate change and where a single person who makes a lot of noise is now classified as an illegal protest.

The laws that have been introduced since the Vagrancy Act was passed still risk criminalising being on the streets, just in different ways. This year, the Labour government’s 2026 Crime and Policing Act includes new offences, like organising begging for financial gain and trespassing “with the intention of committing crimes”.

Charles Dickens has already satirised this earnest but impractical kind of nitpicking. A mere 13 years after the Vagrancy Act, he published Oliver Twist, said to be based on his own experiences in the workhouse. It depicts the kind of charity anyone who works at the Centre for Social Justice or the DWP would find immediately familiar – blaming individuals for their poverty and offering Pat McFadden’s Thin Gruel™ as a resolution.

The government describes these as ways of making sure only real criminals are dealt with by the police, rather than criminalising homelessness itself, but many of the arguments to abolish the Vagrancy Act weren’t because it was being used to arrest or detain people, but rather it was used as a threat, to move people on. The raft of new powers given to the police under the 2022 and 2026 policing acts offer plenty of other ways to, intentionally or otherwise, persecute people for sleeping on the streets. Various police forces have, for reasons I won’t go into here, not exactly engendered trust with the public over recent years.

Much like the housing ministry of Robert Jenrick, all the way back in 2021 before he went Full Reform, the current government also claims that instead of criminalising homelessness, it’ll approach it as an opportunity to engage people with the services they need. Steve Reed, the surely almost-former Secretary of State for the Department of Build, Baby, Build, said as much when the Vagrancy Act was repealed.

The problem with saying that there are routes of support open to homeless people is problematic. Purely on the issue of making sure there are enough homes available so that people don’t end up on the streets, the Starmer government make housing a high enough priority to address supply. This lack of supply and failing to remove the household benefit cap prevents the poorest in society being able to afford to live in social rent homes.

Dickens would be having a field day.

2021’s House of Commons Library entry on Rough Sleepers: Enforcement Powers (England) made it clear that it isn’t just legislative barriers that homeless people face. Many businesses, security companies ‘and planners’ also deploy what it describes as “Other deterrent measures”, including “defensive architecture” such as uncomfortable benches and spikes; “wetting down” (the process of soaking and using cleaning products on sheltered areas people might seek to sleep in); gentle bullying and the pervasive ‘alternative giving schemes’, which encourage the public to give money to charity instead of beggars. Let’s face it, if the charities were doing their jobs properly this dichotomy wouldn’t exist.

While this report is a few years out of date, it also makes clear that while government guidance is not to use things such as public spaces protection orders to criminalise homelessness, no data is kept on what local authorities actually do, and some are specifically still using these to deter homelessness despite what the guidance says.

So, while the Vagrancy Act won’t be missed, it seems only appropriate to ask, Please, Sir, could we have some more? It’s not good enough to pretend that homelessness is being dealt with effectively by national policy on housing supply. The idea that it can be picked up and resolved by already strained other public services is unrealistic without more support for them, and indeed for charity services which we know can work to address the issue.

It remains to be seen whether a change in prime minister and whatever reshuffle it brings offers the practical changes that need to be done, rather than the potentially performative act of getting rid of one two-centuries-old law.