Skip to main content

Life on the edge: getting by in recession torn Britain

‘Shirker’ is an interesting word. A shirker is someone who avoids doing work, originating from the German word schurke, meaning rogue. That, according to some politicians, is what you are if you are not a striver. My colleague Iunus was a rogue. He had an expensive heroin and crack habit and shoplifted three times a day along Oxford Street to sate it. He specialised in stealing women’s lingerie. Easy to wrap up in a ball and insert along the arms of your jacket. He was good at it too and at his peak (or nadir) he stole to order, following precise instructions on size. He puffs out his cheeks and shakes his head with shame as he remembers that life.

If you shoplift with that regularity there is a price to pay and Iunus has been to prison on more than 20 occasions with a maximum stay of four months. He moved through the classic recidivist cycle – short sentence, little discharge preparation, out on the streets on release, early renewal of relationship with his dealer, a few months out and back to prison.

Things are not the same for Iunus. Something happened.  People showed faith in him, he stopped using hard drugs, improved his English, developed some skills, changed his attitude. In short, he made himself employable. He is currently the smiling face you meet at reception at our new centre, the Employment Academy.  He is utterly trusted.  He greets guests, prepares rooms for events, reports repairs, opens the building in the morning and locks up at night. 

He’s facing some challenges, is Iunus. This is bleak mid-winter in double-dip recession Britain.  Iunus is one of the working poor and he has a criminal history that is dead and buried but the ghost of it can still arise to snap at his heels. You may think you have some embarrassing gaps in your CV, but explaining twenty spells in prison in a job interview is possibly on a different level. Iunus claims no welfare benefits at present and doesn’t intend to. The welfare benefit reforms appal him and he believes he will be completely undone by the bureaucracy involved in making a fresh claim. He steps forward for as many shifts with different Thames Reach teams as is permissible. This week when he was not at the Employment Academy he was doing outreach work in Croydon. It’s a tense business juggling shifts to bring in the £400 a week needed to survive in his housing association flat. He reels off the bills – council tax, rent, gas, water, electricity; a mantra with the familiar monotony of the shipping forecast. He’s got some great skills. Not just an instinctive understanding of how to deliver good customer care but fluency in Portuguese, Urdu, Hindi, English and Spanish. 

C-jae shares reception duty with Iunus in a voluntary capacity. He grew up in south London and trained in repro-graphics. In the current economic climate jobs in this specialist area are scarce. C-jae has struggled to find work, at one stage boldly establishing his own t-shirt printing business with New Enterprise Allowance funding, available to people on Job Seeker’s Allowance, investing money in a heat press and focusing on e-bay sales. But the bureaucracy did for him with delays in NEA payments leading to rent arrears and eventually the loss of his accommodation. He sofa hopped for four months, using up the goodwill of friends, eventually being given help to access a basic studio flat in the private rented sector where he pays £800 a month, scraping in under the Local Housing Allowance ceiling. 

C-jae is grittily determined. He’s got himself a further qualification, an NVQ in adult social care and has done a training programme called volunteering to employment to extend his skills set. He’s feeling anxious as his landlord will not be renewing his assured short-hold tenancy and there is the looming prospect of being assigned to the Work Programme. C-Jae is of the view that joining the Work Programme will hamper his chances of getting a job when he is so close to finding one. He’s heard stories of daily appointments and copious paperwork that he fears will act as a restraint, causing him to lose momentum, break stride. He grimaces as he describes the inflexibility of his job centre where he was informed, wrongly, that he could only do 16 hours a week as a volunteer without his benefits being affected.

C-jae talks eloquently about the great blanket of depression that can cloak you when you face long-term employment and the sweaty fear that grips when you think too long about having to get by on £71 a week JSA and live in accommodation where a landlord’s whim can leave you once again having to knock on the door of friends to plead for a few days kip on the sofa.

This evening the three of us lock up and leave the building together. They are remorselessly cheerful as we go our separate ways. Two men striving to find a way of climbing up towards the sunlit uplands of housing and job security and maybe even a loving relationship too but who sometimes appear to be walking close to the edge of a very precipitous drop. Maybe it’s the bitter cold and smothering January darkness, but unlike them I am gripped by a bout of despair.  There is no getting away from it; these are wretched times.    

This article was published in Inside Housing magazine on January 25th 2013

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Super-strength lager is a beer for sipping, possibly from a wine glass - and other delusions

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 altho

Killing with kindness

Much has been written about the psychology of giving, the reasons why we donate to charity and the different triggers that spark acts of generosity, some rational, others visceral. I am particularly fascinated by the impulses that lead us to give money to people begging on the street. In fact, to be candid, I am frequently left incredulous at the justification given for dropping money into that cap next to the sign that says ‘hungry and homeless’. Research indicates that for 90 per cent of people who give, compassion is the motivating factor. So I should not have been surprised that when speaking on BBC radio last week on the subject of begging, the first question was ‘isn’t it counter-intuitive that a homelessness charity is urging us not to give to beggars’? There he is, the homeless man cross-legged beside the cash point, beseeching, grimy, desperate. Do the right thing. A few years ago, one such man attracted the attention of Grant Shapps, then the shadow housing minister,

Out of sight - sleeping rough in car parks and corridors

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