Ending homelessness

This blog was originally published in December 2015 as one of a series of essays to commemorate  the life of Chris Holmes who made an extraordinary contribution to tackling homelessness. The complete set of essays can be found at   http://bit.ly/1O1TFxT The speaker is in full flow and has the audience at the homelessness conference in his grip. He is a powerful speaker and his controlled anger is palpable as he jabs the air with his forefinger. It is a familiar litany of observations about how the poor are under attack and the homeless are in the firing line, their lives blighted by a series of brutal government policies and incomprehensible funding decisions taken by local authorities. Welfare benefit cuts are castigated, unimaginative local commissioning of homelessness services ridiculed and the inadequacy of the housing safety net laid bare.  The congregation of homelessness sector representatives have heard this type of denunciation before. It is well...

Funerals of homeless people are frequently harrowing. I have attended too many: around three a year for the last 29 years. There is the gnawing anxiety about the size of the congregation. Will there be enough people in attendance to give them a decent send off? My worst funeral was Ken Hobart’s. When I arrived at the crematorium it quickly became apparent that I would be the only one to pay him last respects. Ken had fought with the British army during the Second World War in the Far East. It was highly likely that some of his comrades were still alive but it seems that for years before his death he was long gone and forgotten. Unlike many homeless people he had no inclination to talk about the war, at least not to me. He was an affable man who had drifted into rough sleeping via Salvation Army hostels and boarding houses in the 1960s and 1970s. At least at the time of his death in 1994 we had managed to find Ken a small bedsit where, with a degree of comfort, he had lived out h...