No Longer a Crime: Celebrating the Repeal of the Vagrancy Act

A homeless person in the streets of London.

On Monday 29 June 2026, something changed that we at Sant'Egidio UK have long hoped to see. The Vagrancy Act, a law that for nearly two hundred years made it a criminal offence simply to sleep rough or to beg, was repealed.

We are thrilled.

Every Wednesday, our friends go out on the Rounds of Friendship. We carry tea, soup, but mostly we carry time. We sit on pavements. We learn names. We listen to stories that rarely get told anywhere else. And in nearly every one of those stories, there is a quiet sense that having nowhere to sleep is somehow a personal failing, a fault to be hidden rather than a wound to be tended.

For almost two centuries, the law backed up that shame. A person with no roof over their head could be treated as an offender rather than as someone in need. Housing Secretary Steve Reed put it simply when announcing the repeal: "Homeless people are not criminals, they are people who need help." It is a plain sentence, but it corrects something that should never have needed correcting in the first place.

At Sant'Egidio, we believe in a preferential option for the poor, a church from below that does not look down on those who are struggling but stands beside them, at street level, as a friend. Friendship, for us, is not a programme. It is the beginning of dignity. And dignity is very hard to offer someone the law still calls a criminal.

That is why this repeal matters so much to us. It will not, on its own, get a single person off the street tonight. Housing does that, and support does that, and the patient work of relationship does that. But laws shape how a society sees its most vulnerable members, and for two hundred years this one told rough sleepers, quietly but persistently, that they were somehow at fault for their own suffering. Removing it removes one more obstacle between someone in crisis and the help they need, one less reason to hide.

We know this is one step, not the whole road. Real change will be measured in the years ahead. We will keep watching for that, and we will keep showing up to do our part.

For now, we allow ourselves to feel the weight lifted. Somewhere in London, someone will bed down for the night in a doorway, and for the first time in almost two hundred years, the law will not call them a criminal for it. It will simply see them as a person. No more shame, or hiding a need. That is where compassion can begin.