Ending homelessness

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...

“Where have the homeless moved to? Can you help us find them?” asks a woman on the phone. It’s a bad line and there is traffic noise in the background. “We are seeking out junkies, winos and vagrants.”  It occurs to me that perhaps she is being deliberately provocative by using such pejorative terms but no, after a few questions it is clear that she is sincere. She is with a church group which has travelled into central London, moved by “the plight of the homeless”. Central London is overburdened with vast numbers of visiting soup runs, so I don’t offer directions but refer her to Housing Justice which does an excellent job working with faith groups to ensure their important contribution is coordinated and effective. Then I muse over her language and what it tells me about how people who are homeless are perceived. I am influenced by @bullringbash who tweets in an illuminating way on homelessness issues, a man who by his own admission spent destructive years in the 1990s at...

‘ 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...

 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...