Why are there so few rough sleepers in Japan?
Dogged by decades of stagnant growth, Japan is often dismissed as an economic basket case. When it comes to public policy, British conservatives are far keener to learn from Singapore, Hong Kong, or even the rather dystopian Gulf states.
Yet while the Land of the Rising Sun is clearly no free-market paradise, there is an awful lot Britain could learn from this fellow island nation. It has plenty going for it: a fantastic, privately run railway network, a high-trust society, and a formidable new prime minister in Sanae Takaichi.
When I visited recently, I was struck by the lack of antisocial behaviour and the near-total absence of street homelessness - a far cry from most major Western cities. I hadn’t realised quite how much I had taken for granted the low-level crime, graffiti, and litter that characterise much of modern urban life.
Much of this is down to Japan’s no-nonsense attitude towards rough sleeping, which is, in almost all cases, the downstream result of addiction or severe mental illness. Where Western nations (undoubtedly guided by well-meaning motivations) spent decades closing down public mental health institutions, Japan has maintained a vast network of privately-run psychiatric hospitals, averaging a world-leading 2.58 beds per 1,000 people. In Japan, vulnerable people are cared for by medical professionals; in Britain, they often end up living on the streets.
Yet Britain does not need to embark on an expensive, politically fraught campaign to rebuild a Japanese-style asylum network to tackle rough sleeping. As a liberal, I am loath to expand our bloated welfare state, and I certainly wouldn't trust the NHS to efficiently administer such a scheme.
Instead, we can achieve the same results via the Finnish-style “Housing First” model - an approach the Adam Smith Institute has previously advocated. Under this system, rough sleepers are immediately provided with apartments and intensive professional support, contributing to rent if they are financially able.
Housing First immediately slashes the massive downstream costs of rough sleeping (such as crime and emergency healthcare) currently borne by taxpayers. And, by reducing the burden on emergency services, its costs are fully recouped within six-years. Housing First delivers Tokyo-style streets while protecting individual liberty and saving taxpayer money.
While Japan’s psychiatric infrastructure and the Housing First models might differ, they share a guiding principle: you cannot treat severe mental illness or addiction while someone is sleeping on the streets. No civilised society should treat homelessness as inevitable, and both approaches tackle it with the urgency it requires.
We can treat the root causes later, but to tackle rough sleeping, we must get people off the streets first.
Sebastian Charleton
