Ending homelessness

 In those most desperate of weeks that crossed Christmas and the New Year I was getting daily updates on the Somali couple living rough outside TK Maxx on a busy south London street.  A mother and son both with severe and enduring mental health problems, exhibiting delusional behaviour and severe self-neglect. They had been there for months, resisting all offers of accommodation or hospital treatment.  Engagement with mental health specialists, our outreach workers, the police and members of the Somali community had all been in vain.  Over the months their belongings blossomed around them. Carrier bags within carrier bags, suitcases, bedding, food cartons: the detritus of the destitute.  Around the corner and out of sight of passers-by stood buckets in which they defecated. With Christmas approaching and the temperature falling the plight of the Somali couple became a shared obsession.  Multi-agency case conferences took place to consider their me...

5.00am. Dawn light is beginning to streak an indigo night sky. The battered caravan seems deserted. A brisk rap on its door by my colleague Ben breaks the silence. This is the early morning outreach shift in an outer London borough. In this road adjacent to a park there are a line of assorted vehicles, most of which appear to be derelict.  My two outreach colleagues, Ben and Helena, between them speak Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian and English. Eventually there is a rustle from inside and the heads of a man and women emerge. There follows an amiable conversation with Ben who has met the couple before. They are Romanian and working to earn money for their extended family back home. Previously the caravan was located beside another park nearby, but they were required to move from there by the police. The couple paid a vehicle removal company to transport the caravan to this new site. Ben asks after the child who was previously living in the caravan with them and t...

  My colleague Dean is telling me about his day; his harrowing day. Most of it has been spent at the hospital supporting Samantha.  Samantha is 31 and she has been addicted to heroin since the age of 15. Her weakened immune system has led to the onset of septicaemia. Dean found her in her usual rough sleeping spot lying in he own faeces and called an ambulance.  Samantha has lived the life of a homeless drug addict for the last decade. All her friends are from the street. Today she was visited in hospital by her boyfriend who is also a heroin user. He is found by her bed with a syringe, surreptitiously trying to inject her. There is uproar. Nurses and security are called and he is bundled out of the ward. Dean arrives at the height of the commotion and succeeds in calming Samantha, preventing her, dressed in a hospital gown, following her boyfriend out of the building and back to sleeping rough. The usually imperturbable Dean is dejected. ‘She has lost the w...

It is the last meeting of the Saturday Club before Christmas. Next week it’s the Christmas meal. Roy, the elected head, has negotiated a price of £12 a head with a restaurant near Leicester Square. ‘That’s turkey with all the trimmings’ he explains. The group is just about scraping by financially. Members are pleased with the deal Roy has struck. There is an end of term feel to the Saturday Club. An apprehensive mood prevails as each member ruminates over what the festive season may bring. The conversation revolves around memories of best and worst Christmas days. Each person, it seems, has something in common; they have all experienced a Christmas day when they have been on their own. Patrick describes spending Christmas day 1973 in a derelict house without windows in Deptford, south London.  A new arrival to the country from Ireland , he was unaware of the services available to the destitute and tried to sleep away most of the day, waking to find himself gently keening f...

What a truly complex job outreach work with rough sleepers is nowadays. Occasionally I attend meetings of our street teams and listen with amazement at the intricacies of the issues they painstakingly seek to unravel. Frequently these involve complex immigration matters. I recently asked an outreach colleague what single thing would help her most in her work. She unhesitatingly responded, ‘rapid access to decent immigration advice’.   The profile of rough sleeping in Britain changed profoundly following the accession of eight central and eastern European countries to the European Union (EU) in 2004, a further two following in 2007.   In London in 2005-6, central and eastern Europeans comprised just 6% of the rough sleeping population. The latest statistics (2012-13) show that this figure has risen to  28%. In total, 1772 different individuals from central and eastern Europe slept rough in London over the year.  Now 53% of London’s rough sleeping population are...

From the seventh floor of the multi-storey car-park at this late hour the view is rather magnificent, but a cruel wind is whipping up the rubbish and there is not a soul around. I’m a Thames Reach London Street Rescue team volunteer tonight searching for rough sleepers with my colleague Rob and we have received a self-referral from a man sleeping rough in the car-park. It’s been a frustrating night. In Hounslow we discovered plenty of cardboard bedding but not the group of Lithuanians we feared could be sleeping rough. Under Kew Bridge and in a park in Putney the lone rough sleepers we have been tasked with contacting were not in their usual places. I ruminate on the unsettling paradox of being grievously disappointed not to find someone sleeping rough in sub-zero temperature. But here on the stairwell we find our man, a 21-year old Pole called Karol. His is a story which is virtually a generic tale of youth homelessness. He came to this country as a fourteen year old u...

I’m often told that the number of women sleeping rough is underestimated because women feel especially vulnerable on the street and hide themselves away in places where they will be difficult to find. The certainty with which this is stated is in stark contrast to the hesitancy that follows when you ask for some evidence of where these women rough sleepers might be. Despite outreach teams scouring not only the familiar rough sleeping areas but also housing estates, woodland and even riding the night buses to find rough sleepers, the number of women sleeping rough in London as a proportion of the overall homeless population stands at just 12%. Far from facing a problem of being hidden, I am concerned that women rough sleepers have a disadvantage that arises from their very visibility and prominence. There has always been a danger that we romanticise rough sleeping, viewing it as a form of rugged individualism, a lifestyle choice adopted by impressively eccentric characters making a s...

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...

‘Welcome to the underworld’ said the policemen as he shut the gate to the squat. I had asked to visit one of the derelict buildings which Thames Reach’s outreach teams regularly enter to meet and assist the people hidden away in its dark recesses. A few weeks earlier in a conversation with outreach colleagues I was shocked to hear that they considered the conditions endured by people living in derelict buildings to be more appalling than those facing rough sleepers on the street. They reminded me that we knew of six people who had died in ‘squats’ from different causes including an accident (falling down broken stairs),overdoses and a murder. This particular squat is vast. The entrance courtyard, blackened by fire and roofless, has strewn around it paraphernalia that presents a squalid pastiche of deprivation in 21st century Britain. There is a scattering of syringes, small blackened bottles requisitioned for the smoking of crack, the desiccated body of a rat, numerous television sets...

A fine drizzle has started and the crowd waiting on the street close to the Westminster Cathedral piazza in Victoria is slowly growing, even though the first run is not due for another hour. Clusters of eastern European men are quietly chatting. There are a lot of people standing alone wearing rucksacks or clutching plastic bags, pressed against buildings, trying to stay dry. Jacqui and Tommy are sitting cross-legged on the pavement. They seem an incongruous couple. Jacqui has been sleeping rough in London for a few months having fled Glasgow after breaking up with her violent partner. At times it is difficult for me to follow Jacqui’s guttural Glaswegian but it seems that she has been asked to leave a number of hostels and day centres because of her behaviour and was even banned from the entire Victoria area for a while and forced to move over the river to Vauxhall. She is unconcerned by this reputation for aggression and intends to continue sleeping rough as there is nothing for...