Ending homelessness

How I treasure my  memories of the homeless people I worked with from the time in the 1980s when I was, in turn, a hostel, outreach and resettlement worker.   Such warm recollections of a procession of individuals who invariably treated me with courtesy and kindness, dispensing practical advice to a raw kid who was, at times, out of his depth. Though in circumstances where people were frequently struggling with alcohol or drug dependency, debilitating mental health problems and extreme living conditions there was also an overlay of threat, sporadic violence and moments of stomach-churning fear. At 22, working in a homeless young people’s hostel near Kings Cross station in London there was plenty of opportunity to taste fear on a regular basis. We were a young team, the hostel was expected to take the most chaotic young people from the West End and it was 1981, a time when, at least in my experience, risk assessments had still to be invented.   Hostel shifts felt like a ...

There is a shopping mall in London where over 50 people sleep rough every night. It represents the biggest congregation of rough sleepers in the capital.   At 7.30 in the morning when I was there recently it was clearing rapidly of rough sleepers who were being hastened along by the amiable security staff. Around 20 people were still gathering together their belongings. There was an astonishing range of nationalities - English, Indian, Eritrean, Portuguese, Italian, Lithuanian and Romanian. Some were heading off to work shifts in restaurants and on building sites. One man proudly flourished his CSCS card, that highly prized proof that the owner has the required training and qualifications to work in the construction industry. He would be returning that night to the relative comfort of the mall. Relative, that is, to the other places where outreach workers meet rough sleepers in 21st century London – on buses, in public toilets, in hospital A&E departments, along canal tow...

Aren’t reflections on a year always anchored by a specific episode in time? This is mine. In November I went out on a street outreach shift. By 6.30 in the morning we were at our first destination, a police station where the waiting area had become a haven for a group of people who would otherwise be sleeping on the street. The beaming desk sergeant waved us in; he knew my outreach colleague well.  Four rough sleepers were spread out across the seats. First we spoke with a woman well known to our team who was awaiting a psychiatric assessment. Her conversation ranged erratically from her being immoderately grateful for our help to threatening us with legal action if we failed to resolve her homelessness. We updated her on progress and she once again turned down our offer of emergency accommodation.  Next to her was a middle-aged man staring, preoccupied, into the distance. He did not respond to my outstretched hand but as my fingers brushed his wrist he grabbed my arm ...

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 ...

Steve was telling me about the delusional behaviour of the drink dependent person – the alcoholic, as he refers to himself. Not, he was quick to point out, a recovered alcoholic. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. In his view, you can’t risk relaxing and then relapsing. You need to be on constant guard. At various times Steve had convinced himself that he could be a normal drinker. He would venture into his local pub and have a pint, then sit there all night trying not to think about a second pint. Having successfully reached last orders, he’d go home satisfied that his consumption of alcohol was under control.  But on the second night he would be the last to leave the pub having drank steadily all evening. By the end of the week, raging at the bar staff for refusing to serve him, his final ignominious departure was often assisted by the police. By now, out of control, he would buy six-packs of super-strength lager to drink at home. He preferred Tennent’s Super a...

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...

Beside Kiev railway station there is a space the size of a small waiting room and on this dank December evening the first homeless people are filing in, some a little hesitantly as this is a new destination; until recently they were sleeping rough outside and in derelict buildings or tunnels – anywhere to escape the vicissitudes of the harsh Ukrainian winter.   The room has been made habitable through the installation of benches by Depaul International in response to an urgent request from the beleaguered railway authorities, struggling to cope with the hundreds of destitute people living rough in the vicinity of the station. I and fellow trustees from the London Housing Foundation (LHF), a grant-making charity providing financial support for Depaul’s work in the Ukraine and Slovakia, are visiting to witness at first hand the homelessness situation in these countries and the impact of Depaul’s work. Svetlana shows no reticence in talking about her situation. Follow...

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...