Skip to main content

Drear days: No return to cardboard city


It’s been a bitter February. The outreach teams have been out in force across Britain’s cities assisting rough sleepers to come inside. Bizarrely, even in -5 degrees some people remain implacable in their determination to stay in the shop doorway.  According to some observers this is a ‘lifestyle choice’ though I tend to agree with @aibaihe, a particularly insightful tweeter who, after almost two constant years of rough sleeping, reflected recently: ‘I have never met anyone on the street who didn’t want to live inside’. Thankfully hundreds of rough sleepers did escape the streets during the cold patch as Severe Weather Emergency Protocols or SWEP were triggered and additional beds made available. 

Despite this monumental effort there exists a corrosive cynicism about the work undertaken with rough sleepers by outreach teams. They are sometimes called ‘government funded’ outreach teams, this being a pejorative term. I remember how, in the 1980s, we tirelessly campaigned to force government to take seriously the issue of rough sleeping by funding street outreach teams in the certain knowledge that the money was not going to come from shaking collection tins at railway stations. We were realists. Rough sleepers sometimes smell and occasionally do bad things. They do not have the premium brand of innocence carried by aged donkeys or baby seals. So I watch our street teams girding up for another street shift, already red-eyed and exhausted after too many late nights and mull over with considerable resentment the detail of yet another phone call from an intrepid journalist who, like the gaggle before him, wanted to discuss the rumour that we are trying to ‘clear the streets for the Olympics’.

The same journalist inquiring about pernicious attempts to clear the streets moved effortlessly on to the other story, the increase in rough sleeping, the prevailing orthodoxy being that society no longer cares and we are returning with grim inevitability to the days of ‘cardboard city’ when vast numbers of people congregated together to sleep in parks and under bridges.  But I cannot agree that things have got worse, indeed in many ways they have got immeasurably better and our responses more humane. In 1986 during one of the coldest Februarys for decades I remember leaving the Embankment in central London at 2.00am in the morning in the knowledge that around 80 men and women were that night consigned to sleeping fitfully on the pavement or in the two red telephone boxes nearby. There was no SWEP provision in those days. Twice during my four years as an outreach worker those boxes were opened in the morning by street cleaners for them to find the frozen body of a dead rough sleeper. Then it felt as if we grieved alone, with the death of a rough sleeper barely rippling the surface of local authority consciousness. Today the death of a person sleeping rough is treated with considerably greater seriousness, frequently subject to detailed investigation and is always a matter of remorse and regret.            

Recently released government figures on rough sleeping suggest that numbers are on the increase. Unfortunately the government has trapped itself into reporting on rough sleeping through a mechanism which mixes ‘snapshot’ street counts with local authority estimates, a flawed, inconsistent approach producing essentially inconsequential numbers. In London a shared database called CHAIN which is used by all the street teams provides comprehensive annual rough sleeping figures. Figures from CHAIN similarly indicate that rough sleeping is increasing. Yet the statistics also illustrate that the vast majority of people contacted by the outreach teams are only on the street for days or weeks. Increased weekend shifts and prompter, more efficient responses have enabled the outreach teams to reach new arrivals to the street earlier and to help them off more quickly. These are not the street homeless the public recognise - those people literally living on the street, frequently suffering from poor mental health or with drug and alcohol problems. Increased activity has undoubtedly driven up the number of people contacted. Surely the time has come to measure rough sleeping not only in terms of how many people are on the street but, crucially, how long they have been there?

Recently I was involved in a street count around Waterloo and the South Bank in Lambeth, south London. We found in total 15 rough sleepers and concluded that with numbers so low there was no earthly reason why rough sleeping in Lambeth shouldn’t be ended for good in 2012. That night I felt I was accompanied by assorted ghosts. In the late 1980s up to 100 rough sleepers lived in ‘bashes’ (basic shelters constructed from wood and other material) at Waterloo.  One of those rough sleepers was another perceptive tweeter @bullringbash who speaks poignantly of the inexorable shadow cast by the bullring over his life. He has escaped homelessness and now lives and works in the Midlands. We communicate about the old days of the bullring, not with wistful nostalgia but with something more akin to revulsion.

It was at the bull-ring that I came a across an ambulance crew stooping over the corpse of Archie, a young Scot. His body had lain under a blanket all day and the extensive marks on his torso and legs suggested foul play. But the autopsy showed that he had died of a heart attack and the marks had been left by rats. They had nipped and gnawed his gaunt frame over the preceding twelve hours as he lay there unnoticed and unmissed. 

We have come so far, yet perversely seem to get satisfaction from denigrating the progress made and the extraordinary efforts of staff at the frontline. Worse, we look back with the selectivity of the chronically amnesic. Ah, my friends, those were the days, where did it all go so wrong?

[This blog was published in Inside Housing on March 2nd 2012]
 

Comments

dharman said…
Great thoughts you got there, believe I may possibly try just some of it throughout my daily life.


House for Sale in London
divya2012 said…
excellent work in this site...



Heathrow to Bristol taxi
kanagavelraj said…
Thank you for posting interesting information
Minicabs in london

raj said…
thanks for your information.


Unknown said…
After reading some nice stuff in your article I really feel speechlessstreet teams

Popular posts from this blog

The quietly effective must trump shock and awfulness

Scott lives in an ordinary house in an unmemorable road in Catford, south London. He shares it with Suleiman and Seyi. The house is immaculately clean and Scott is proud of this as he has special responsibilities within the household. Over tea he explains to me and another visitor that as the ‘peer landlord’ he organises the house, making sure that it is kept tidy, bills are paid and good relations maintained with the neighbours. This is an active, purposeful household. Scott has been unemployed for a couple of weeks but is confident that he will soon find work in the motor industry where he has been employed for most of his life. Seyi works long hours in a West End hotel; Suleiman is a student. The house has been purchased by Commonweal, a groundbreaking charity supporting housing solutions that tackle social injustice. The house is leased to Thames Reach and the partnership scheme, Peer Landlord London, is targeted primarily at people in low income jobs. The peer landlord role i

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,

Sleeping rough, working rough - with the Roma in London

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 they expla