Criminalisation of Rough Sleeping to End with Vagrancy Act Repeal

Finally, there will be a repeal of the vagrancy act 1824. Progress, after just 201 years of criminalising the homeless

Last week marked a major win for rough sleeping campaigns when the Government announced that it will decriminalise rough sleeping by repealing the Vagrancy Act, a piece of legislation it said is “neither just nor fit for purpose”¹.

The Vagrancy Act, intended to address the increase in those who were ‘vagrant’, wandering the country without regular employment or income, was introduced in England and Wales in 1824. The now archaic law has been amended extensively over the past 200 years, but remained in place to criminalise unhoused people for sleeping rough and begging. The Act was already repealed in Scotland in 1982, with previous attempts to repeal the Act in England and Wales in 1981. The Government has now announced that the Act will be repealed in its entirety as part of the Crime and Policing Bill, to be passed by Spring 2026.

Homelessness charities (including Crisis, Centrepoint and St Mungo’s, Cymorth Cymru and Shelter Cymru) have campaigned for an end to this law, which criminalized “Every person wandering abroad, or placing himself or herself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage, to beg or gather alms, or causing or procuring or encouraging any child or children so to do; shall be deemed an idle and disorderly person […]”.²

The Act has long been criticised for its archaic approach of prohibiting unhoused people from
fulfilling their basic needs by providing police with the powers to arrest anyone begging and sleeping in a public place. This criticism was accompanied by real concerns that criminalising this behaviour further pushed vulnerable people away from safe spaces, disproportionately affecting women’s safety on the street, while ignoring the long-term systemic solutions to addressing poverty and homelessness.

The power to prosecute unhoused people was questioned before court when the Crown Prosecution Service brought charges under the Vagrancy Act against three men for stealing £33 worth of food from the bins outside a supermarket. The CPS dropped the charges following questions of whether pursing this matter was in the wider public interest.³

While the number of people arrested under the Act has fallen over the past decade,⁴ the Act continued to be used informally as a threat to move people on from the areas in which they were sleeping. Moreover, the formal and informal use of this law fails to consider the circumstances that have led to the alleged offence, or the real impact a prosecution will have on the alleged offender.

The repeal of the Act will hopefully mark a shift away from criminalising homelessness and toward addressing homelessness through reform and funding in the criminal justice and housing sector.

Crucially, the Government does not intend to introduce equivalent or harsher measures to address homelessness through the Crime and Policing Bill, and will instead aim to introduce financial support for people experiencing homelessness and new legislation targeting “real crimes” such as organised begging by gangs.⁵

To address the broader social issues behind the ongoing rise in homelessness, any future reform should provide for a range of proportionate responses, with the use of targeted criminal law reserved as the final and most severe option. Furthermore, it should enable the police, the prosecution, and courts to take into account the rights and interests of homeless and impoverished individuals.

At Hodge Jones & Allen, we have long supported the rights of vulnerable individuals and campaigned against unjust laws that disproportionately affect the homeless. If you or someone you know has been impacted by homelessness or criminal proceedings under the Vagrancy Act, our Housing and Crime teams are here to help. Call 0330 822 3451 today for advice, support, or legal representation.

Further reading
To prevent or punish homelessness? The Vagrancy Act 1824
Should the homeless be protected by hate crime law?
Scrap the Vagrancy Act. Homelessness is not a crime.