As the Vagrancy Act is set to be scrapped, Dr Dave Hitchcock explains its history and influence for the last 200 years.

Yesterday, the Labour government announced that it was scrapping the 1824 Vagrancy Act. A cruel legislative leftover from nineteenth century expansions of urban policing power and reforming crusades to ‘clean up’ the streets of UK cities. The Act criminalised pretty much all begging in a public place, as well as putting people at risk of doing something illegal if they slept rough on the streets overnight.

‘Vagrant’ was the term habitually given in law to a set of poor, generally mobile, and often unhoused people who could be criminalised before this law was passed, even if they were not seen to be doing anything particularly wrong. It was what we historians might call a ‘crime of status’, and it was something that nineteenth-century legislators found distasteful and wished to stamp out.

After a little over 200 years the last vestiges of 1824 Vagrancy Act, a lingering artefact of Victorian ‘poverty policing’, are gone, but its legacies of discretionary ‘suspicion of intent’ policing remain with us and are embedded in a host of other policing activities.

The BBC’s headline for this suggests that sleeping rough is now to be decriminalised. This would be laudable, but I am not sure striking down this Act alone does enough to make this the case.

Historians are often interested in origins and beginnings, and the main story about the 1824 Act’s beginnings is the rise of paid, professionalised, and highly ‘discretionary’ policing in the nineteenth century London.

In the House of Commons on June 8^th 1815, the right honourable MP Mr Rose, spoke of a ‘Mr. Martin, a respectable gentleman in this neighbourhood, and well known to many members of this House’ who had, ‘with the greatest industry, compiled an account of the numbers and description of people in a medicant state in the metropolis and its vicinity’.

According to Mr Martin’s doubtless assiduous reporting ‘there were, on the whole, somewhat more than 15,000 persons in the metropolis and its immediate neighbourhood who subsisted by begging’.  Mr Rose noted that ‘the inconvenience to the public was notorious’ and he tutted that street children were raised in infamy as ‘it was clear that the children must be brought up in habits of idleness, vice, and misery.’ His complaints echoed those of seventeenth-century poor law officials and justices of the peace almost word for word.

The 1824 Vagrancy Act was one legislative result of motions like Mr Rose’s. It resulted from a series of parliamentary committees appointed to explore, and then do something about, the rising levels of destitution and ‘mendicity’ (begging) in the capital. What it did was make mendicity, or begging, as well as rough sleeping overnight, loitering, and a range of other public order offenses, into crimes for which a police officer could arrest someone ‘on suspicion’ that they were committing them, even if the officer had not seen the person commit the offense.

The Act was also in effect the foundation stone of modern British policing, as Paul Lawrence notes when he writes that ‘it came to underpin the massive expansion of policing, which began with the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.’ Policing the poor in public was one of the primary initial duties of Britain’s first police force.

That same force was still making arrests using this law up to today. The number of such arrests is, on a positive note, far lower than the 38,777 recorded by authorities in 1913. Between 2019 and 2023, the London Metropolitan Police arrested 28 people under the age of 25 explicitly for begging. The grand total of people arrested in London over these four years comes to 705, of which only 368 individuals ended up charged, and in the vast majority of cases for crimes quite distinct from vagrancy (such as theft, or a drugs offense) even if a ‘Vagrancy Act’ offense remained on their charge sheet.

It is good that the 1824 Act is to be struck off, and it is particularly good that the lingering use of ‘Section 4’ suspicion of activity arrests will no longer be permitted. Given the decline in their use in recent years this is clearly already in the guidance being issued to officers. It is a step forward for public order policing to let go of wide and vaguely defined ‘suspicion of’ powers of arrest and detainment, particularly as they do not line up with how most other police powers are codified in UK today. But scrapping this Act should only be the starting point of a wider campaign to de-criminalise poverty, in as many ways as the government can find.

Absolutely nothing in the three hundred plus years of poverty history that I have studied suggests that criminalising the poor so much as changes their behaviour, never mind assisting with their material circumstances (usually the cause of any criminality in the first place). The notion that it comes down to a lack of discipline is terminally ill-judged. In effect, “Workhouses don’t work”, as I’ve often talked about with my BA History students. The Britons I study three centuries ago had a highly developed understanding of ‘crimes of necessity’ and often found ways to forgive or ameliorate criminal punishments for them. If the government sets out to reform the criminal statute book perhaps it can learn from their sympathy in the face of need.

Dr Dave Hitchcock is a Reader in Early Modern British History.