Ending homelessness

Amongst the front-line staff at Thames Reach, those undertaking outreach work on the street or managing our hostels for rough sleepers, there is always a sense of relief when the Christmas period is behind them.  Christmas is a time when we can expect a surge in support from the public and, concurrently, there is also an increased risk of people dying on the street. This is because so much of the public’s seasonal largesse is focused on giving to people who are visibly present on the street and, in order to be in the position to be a recipient, those who have moved away from rough sleeping will often return to the street at Christmas.  In late November, a Big Issue seller I follow who is active on Twitter tweeted that he had been forced to move from his usual pitch outside a supermarket because an intimidating former rough sleeper, now housed, had requisitioned it for the lucrative Christmas period.  Outreach workers meanwhile pay special attention ...

In the last six months there have been five deaths of rough sleepers, all well known to the Thames Reach outreach workers seeking to help them build a life away from the street, each death a crushing blow. They include a Polish rough sleeper found dead on a dirty mattress along a canal tow-path. Another, a man in his early forties who discharged himself from hospital where he was being treated for pneumonia. Heroin dependency drove him back onto the street and his body was discovered at his regular begging pitch outside a south London train station. This cull of blighted lives; it can’t go on. All five were long-term rough sleepers, or ‘entrenched’ as we call them nowadays. Entrench: ‘To construct a defensive position by digging a trench’, a dehumanizing word which subliminally implies that the person has elected to sleep rough, obdurately burrowing away in order to avoid the reality of the world around them. It meshes neatly with a suite of words or phrases that places res...

Much has been written about the psychology of giving, the reasons why we donate to charity and the different triggers that spark acts of generosity, some rational, others visceral. I am particularly fascinated by the impulses that lead us to give money to people begging on the street. In fact, to be candid, I am frequently left incredulous at the justification given for dropping money into that cap next to the sign that says ‘hungry and homeless’. Research indicates that for 90 per cent of people who give, compassion is the motivating factor. So I should not have been surprised that when speaking on BBC radio last week on the subject of begging, the first question was ‘isn’t it counter-intuitive that a homelessness charity is urging us not to give to beggars’? There he is, the homeless man cross-legged beside the cash point, beseeching, grimy, desperate. Do the right thing. A few years ago, one such man attracted the attention of Grant Shapps, then the shadow housing minister, ...

He thrusts his hand towards me as soon as I emerge from Old Street underground station, fingers curled in a half-grip, long dirty nails. ‘Please give me some change’.   It’s good English with a familiar Eastern European inflection.   He’s stumbling along beside me now and he’s already calculated that I won’t be giving him any money.   ‘What about a kebab – a chicken kebab’.   We stop to talk and I look at him more closely.   He has the most terrible hair-cut – a real Gulag special - and is filthy, really filthy and looks half-starved. He tells me his name is Jan Dudek and he is Polish. We move on to the kebab house and he seems strangely embarrassed that he must resort to this – begging a stranger to buy him some food.   ‘A small kebab will do – just a small one with garlic sauce’. Inside the kebab house the two young Turkish men nod sagely as they impassively slice pieces from the slab of chicken meat rotating on the spit. They know him well and sole...

Sleeping rough is extreme. There you are, lying on a hard pavement or in a shop doorway with, at best, a thin blanket protecting you from the cold and a piece of cardboard insulating you from the rising damp. You know it will disintegrate into a soggy porridge as soon as it begins to rain. Your isolation is profound. Yet frequently, if you are sleeping rough in central London, thousands of people will be swirling around you as they go about their business, walking on by. Extreme things happen to those sleeping rough. They experience a range of truly remarkable responses to their predicament. Maz slept rough for a few years at London Bridge station in central London. She was seriously addicted to super-strength lager and heroin and had to beg through the day to keep both herself and her boyfriend supplied with these devastatingly damaging drugs, one illegal, the other not. Maz told me that one night she was approached by a smart man in a suit and given what is often referred to by ...