Children as young as 10 arrested for rough sleeping with police using 200-year-old law

A charity has shared figures with LBC which show a 200-year-old law is being used to ‘criminalise homelessness’ and is being used disproportionately against young people, despite a promise by the government to scrap it in 2022. Data gathered by Centrepoint shows more than 620 people under the age of 26 have been detained by police forces across England in the past five years using the power afforded by the Vagrancy Act. There are concerns that a new proposed law could send that figure higher.

“How are we going to ever expect people to get out of the cycle of homelessness when we’ve created trauma after trauma for them? “The Met Police, by far, their arrests have been massively disproportionate and it’s deeply unfair.” The figures show about 30% of the arrests made by the Metropolitan Police under the Vagrancy Act were of young people.

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