Ending homelessness

In my first year working with homeless people an older colleague, with foreboding, informed me that the homeless people we were supporting were more complex, challenging and needy than anybody had previously experienced.  I remember being shocked, considering it remarkable that I should be starting at the very time when the profile of the homeless population was changing so dramatically. It didn’t occur to me to ask ‘how do you know?’  Every year since, I have heard something like this same statement made. I was therefore not in a condition to be knocked down by a feather when, as a predictable pre-Christmas truism, it was stated that those working with the homeless were encountering an unprecedented increase in ‘the range of complex issues’. Wiser now, I understand that what I first heard those thirty years ago was hyperbole.       A degree of embellishment in the context of such an emotive issue as homelessness is, perhaps, inevitable. However, wh...

‘ Ex-services personnel make up 25% of the rough sleeping population’ stated a business leader to me at a recent event with what a colleague caustically referred to later as ‘the unerring certainty of the terminally ignorant’.  His pronouncement came to mind as I was reading the latest CHAIN annual rough sleeping figures for London   which show that 9% of the rough sleeping population were formerly in the armed services; 3% in the UK armed services and 6% in the armed services of other countries. I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to groups and individuals about rough sleeping and invariably the conversation will coalesce around two questions: who and why? Around both swirl myths and misconceptions. The antidote to the plausible but unsubstantiated anecdote upon which, distressingly, policy decisions are occasionally based is the CHAIN report and data which is unique in terms of the richness of the information and its reliability. The data is compile...

  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...

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...

In Temple Gardens with the Thames close by she sits on a bench this homeless women, slumped forward, face pressed into a mound of belongings that she has stacked on her trolley with intricate care.   Her face is pressed hard into the dirty clothing on top of her assortment of bags. Is she smothering herself?   I stop and watch, but her breathing is deep and regular; the sleep of the constantly exhausted. And, along with the Temple Court barristers and office workers, I walk on by. She is a local character, part of the scene. The outreach teams working with the homeless will certainly know her.   I might ask about her when I get back to the office, but I’ve convinced myself.   And then, with a flush of guilt, I remember Peggy. For four years in the 1980s I was an outreach worker covering a patch stretching across most of central London from Kings Cross station down to Victoria at a time when the number of rough sleepers was vastly greater than today. Under...

The supplicants’ hands are outstretched as they patiently wait to be chosen by the soup run volunteers distributing food on the Strand. I stand and watch in the gloaming and see Barry amongst the crowd. My heart sinks. Thames Reach housed Barry four years earlier. ‘Whatever happened to the flat?’ I ask Barry after the opening pleasantries. Barry frowns with irritation and explains that he’s still got ‘the gaff’. I’ve plainly insulted him. ‘Well I can see the food’s good’ I continue, trying to make amends. But I’ve only succeeded in digging myself in deeper. Barry is moving from irritation to anger. ‘I don’t need the food’ he splutters, sending a shower of crumbs in my direction. We’re not homeless, we just come uptown for the crack’ (meaning conversation, not drugs). He waves his arm to indicate his circle of friends who look equally insulted at being considered ‘the homeless’. I skulk off before I find more than crumbs coming my way. Later, Barry comes to mind when I search ‘homeless’...

‘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...

Last week Ian Austin, the Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Minister responsible for homelessness, came out on an evening shift with Thames Reach’s street outreach teams. Together we walked the dank streets of central London, Ian still in his suit and tie having raced over following a late night debate in the House. Even though he was only two miles from Westminster, he must have felt that he had entered a parallel universe. One of the tasks that evening was to seek out a former rough sleeper who is now in a wheel-chair after his prone body, hidden under cardboard and blankets, was run over one morning by a refuge truck, crushing both his ankles. Ian was appalled, shaking his head in horror. He listened attentively, asking thoughtful questions of the rough sleepers he met and the outreach workers sharing the evening with him. We liked him, and having accompanied dozens of politicians on street shifts over the years, I know that close ...