Ending homelessness in London

Jan - ring home! A homeless Polish man adrift in London

2011-12-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

He thrusts his hand towards me as soon as I emerge from Old Streetunderground station, fingers curled in a half-grip, long dirty nails. ‘Pleasegive me some change’. It’s good Englishwith a familiar Eastern European inflection. He’s stumbling along beside me now and he’s already calculated that Iwon’t be giving him any money. ‘Whatabout a kebab – a chicken kebab’. Westop to talk and I look at him more closely. He has the most terrible hair-cut – a real Gulag special - and is filthy,really filthy and looks half-starved. He tells me his name is Jan Dudek and heis Polish. We move on to the kebab house and he seems strangely embarrassedthat he must resort to this – begging a stranger to buy him some food. ‘A small kebab will do – just a small onewith garlic sauce’.

Inside the kebab house the two young Turkish men nod sagely asthey impassively slice pieces from the slab of chicken meat rotating on thespit. They know him well and solemnly advise me not to give him any money. ‘It’snot good for him – he’s with a bad crowd now. All he does is drink, drink, drink. He used to be a motor cycle courieryou know, but something went wrong. Wekeep an eye on him’. I believethem. Despite the view which somenewspapers positively luxuriate in that, nowadays, nobody cares, the experienceof our outreach teams is that rough sleepers are frequently ‘kept an eye on’ bypeople living and working nearby. I’mmorosely reflecting on the paradox that most members of the public also havelittle idea how many services there are for rough sleepers when one of theTurkish men, on cue, says ‘Is there nothing out there for these people? Heneeds help’.

Through the window I can see him sitting cross-legged on thepavement, head nodding, body suddenly jerking forward as he dozes offmomentarily. Occasionally he leans forward to scratch a suppurating sore on hisankle. A bespectacled man on a bike stops and places a few coins on his coat.Seconds later, a second man who has just scurried past returns, extracts somecoins from a small bag and adds them to the pile. Given that Jan is not even actively begging,this is an impressive return.

Outside, I hand him his chicken kebab along with a free canof coca cola donated by the kebab house and ask him why he isn’t in a hostel ora winter shelter. His answer is incoherent and, I suspect, deliberately opaque.It seems that he has been visited by outreach teams before including ThamesReach’s. I offer to ring the outreach team here and now so that he can be in awinter shelter by the evening but am not surprised to hear that Jan is notquite ready. ‘But maybe in three hours’ he tells me. So I leave him a card with the number to ring inthe almost certain knowledge that it will shortly be blowing in the wind.

Back in the subway tothe underground I count the empty cans of super-strength lager scatteredaround, the ones that Jan and his group have almost certainly been consuming.There is around half a dozen discarded cans of Kestrel Super which I regardwith an especially baleful eye. In 2008, driven by the distressing number ofservice users dying prematurely as a consequence of their addiction to super-strengthlagers, Thames Reach made a formal complaint to the Portman Group whichrepresents the responsible drinks companies. Our case was that it was illogicaland unacceptable to produce super-strength alcohol in a can of a size (500ml)which meant that consuming the contents of the can took the drinker over the dailysafe-drinking threshold as advised by the government of 3-4 units of alcoholfor a man or 2-3 units for a woman. Ourcomplaint was not upheld but the complaints panel did have some criticism forthe producers of Kestrel Super. The panel was of the view that the packaging ofthe product included too many references to the strength of the drink and thatthis, bizarrely, was reinforced ‘by the prominent stern image of a kestrel onthe can’s front’. They requested changesto the packaging. I concluded from thescene in the subway that consumer behaviour had yet to be affected by the kestrelimage becoming less stern or prominent.

Two days later I ask our outreach team that covers the areaclose to Old Streetstation whether they had received a call from Jan. I was not expecting them tosay that he had been in contact, after all, I had witnessed the Great BritishPublic giving Jan the money for at least a couple of cans of Kestrel Superwithout him even needing to raise a grubby palm. Yet I still found myselfwincing with disappointment when they confirmed that no call had been received.

I feel I need to go back and see if Jan is there. I’mbrooding about him and his plight, feeling irritated and angry in a purposelessway. My thoughts are malevolent. I’m frustrated that good people think thatthrowing a few coins on a coat can help someone and by the lack of publicawareness of the services available to someone like Jan. Then my thoughts turn to the companiesproducing the super-strength lagers and ciders. They know that the only people purchasingthese pernicious brews are the heavily addicted, yet still most refuse to endproduction.

I wonder about Jan’s family back in Poland. Have they any idea that their son or husbandis lying in the gutter, living inside a loused-up overcoat, drinking himself todeath? I’m reminded of the words of mycolleague Megan who leads Thames Reach’s London Reconnection Team whichprovides a voluntary, supported return home for Central and Eastern Europeanswho have fallen into destitution. ‘Get them to ring their mothers. Once I can hear them talking to mama I knowthey will be going home. It’s about love,obligation, shame or a mix or all three’.

I don’t think it will be easy to get Jan to ring his motherbut I have asked the outreach team to see if they can find him over the comingweek. Today when I was thinking of him my thoughts became doom-laden andapocalyptic as they do sometimes when I am feeling stressed and anxious aboutsomeone or something. Does that happento you? I saw him stumbling along anunderground tunnel and slumping to the floor, back-resting against a refusebin, clearly inebriated. There was afluttering and a small bird of prey, a kestrel, came to rest on his chest. Itsteadied itself, with its talons pressing into his black coat before stretchingout its neck to pluck out his eyes.

Who are the homeless? Stigma, confusion, misrepresention ...and deception?

2011-11-26T03:00:00.001-08:00

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’ on Twitter. One tweet says, ‘Sad to see so many homeless getting fed on streets of London’.

During the next week the conundrum of explaining who are the homeless returns to haunt me. I‘m meeting a supporter from one of the top auditing companies and he’s done his homework and looked up the government’s most recent quarterly figures on homelessness showing a headline increase of 17% in homeless acceptances between April and June of 2011. ‘Are these the guys on the street or in the hostels?’ he asks. I explain that this statistic refers to a different group altogether; mostly families with dependent children at risk of losing their accommodation who have a statutory right to housing. ‘So these are folks who have a roof over their heads and they have a right to housing and the people on the streets who haven’t got a roof, most don’t have a right to housing’. I nod, adding lamely, ‘it’s complicated’, feeling that, in terms of clarity of communication, this is not my best week.

The homeless person: a shape-shifter taking many forms. This includes the ‘hidden homeless’ person, usually described as sleeping on friends’ floors, ‘sofa surfing’ or squatting. I might have made a claim to being one of the hidden homeless when I lived in the most basic of short-life housing without any heating in the early 1980s. But I had been blessed with a loving family and a good education, I had a way out and ‘homeless’ would have been a false and condescending label. In the room above lived Dave who had been brought up in care. He was a dishevelled and mentally tortured individual. We knew his mental health was deteriorating when he painted all his bedroom windows green. When he painted his dog green too, he was reported to the RSPCA and the authorities became involved, culminating in Dave being transported to a psychiatric hospital. Although we lived in almost identical rooms, our lives as a result of random fortune were on different trajectories. I can accept Dave being described as homeless because his vulnerability had created for him severe housing instability. But this example only illustrates how homelessness often has little to do with literal place and everything to do with life chances.

For most of the public ‘the homeless’ still means those people who live on the street and the iconic depiction of the rough sleeper is a powerful fund-raiser that comes into its own in the run up to Christmas when most people look forward to spending time at home with their families and some, with consternation, wonder about those who can’t. So, in the last few weeks the advertisements have been placed and the leaflets produced as we all seek to raise funds in these bleak times. But there is a dilemma. Annual figures for London show that over half of the rough sleepers in the capital are not UK nationals. 28% come from countries such as Poland and Rumania who joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007 respectively. The statistics paint a chilling picture of who is living long-term on our streets. 53% have a drink problem, 38% have a mental health problem, 39% have a drug problem and 41% have experienced prison. Our outreach teams report that significant numbers have complex immigration problems. Many from central and eastern Europe show a stubborn resistance to acknowledging that returning home is a better option than remaining in destitution in the United Kingdom.

In contrast, the images used by homelessness organisations rarely portray the contemporary composition of the street population. They more closely reflect the street population of the mid-1980s and as such are at least 25 years out of date. For example, pictures of teenagers are frequently used even though in London during the whole of 2010-11 only four young people aged 18 or under were found sleeping rough. It is occasionally suggested that some people, particularly the young, like to sleep in out of the way places or move around and can be missed, but this is unlikely as, these days, the street teams undertake outreach work in derelict buildings and on the night buses too.

The other common image is of the armed services veteran ignominiously left to fend for himself on the street. Again, the statistics over the last few years with remorseless regularity show that only around 3% of rough sleepers were in the UK armed forces, while a further 3% were in the armed forces of other nations.

It is perhaps understandable why charities use these essentially spoof images of rough sleepers. The young and armed forces veterans are the more palatable representations of homelessness and it is gratifying that their plight is regarded as an injustice that should be rectified. At Thames Reach we have used our own form of manipulation by occasionally putting a dog in the picture alongside the rough sleeper, mindful that a BBC poll in 2006 discovered that twice as many people felt sympathy for a homeless dog than for a homeless person with drug or mental health problems and justifying doing so on the basis that we accept dogs, with responsible owners, in some of our hostel accommodation. And let’s be honest, an image of a foreign national forced to live in disgusting conditions in a garage or shed, the actual reality regularly confronting outreach workers, is not going to bring in the donations.

But I remain troubled by the image of the homeless we project in 2011. To find the solutions to homelessness and specifically to rough sleeping we must understand who is homeless and why and engage honestly with the public, media, politicians and funders to find solutions that will end rough sleeping in this country once and for all. Creating this deceptive miasma, however justifiable it might be in terms of raising funds, begs questions about how determined we really are to end rough sleeping in all its ghastly 21st century forms. You, the shivering, plaintive figure on the streets swaddled in blankets; can we really afford to see you go?

A shorter, less personal version of this blog was published in Inside Housing magazine, 25th November 2011

In the Depths of Despair

2011-10-22T02:46:00.000-07:00

‘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 (the innards of a set can be sold as scrap metal for around £10) and literally hundreds of empty super-strength cider and lager cans.

In the shadows at the back of the building there are three men in the main living area which contains a table and some battered chairs. They are wary but friendly. They know us and the police and are eager to get back to their work; the bundling up of metal to be transported in a supermarket trolley to a local scrap metal dealer.

It’s early evening and dusk is upon us as we climb a rickety staircase to the next level of the squat. Here the level of detritus reaches wading levels, washing around our ankles. A rich, sickly aroma emanates from the trash as it is disturbed. My stomach heaves and, with relief, I feel it settle. It would have been embarrassing to have added to the mess.

At the top of the stairs there is a small room and in the half-light it appears that there are three empty beds, but then a figure stirs in one of the beds and sits up. The man seems genuinely pleased to see us. His name is Hanif, a Palestinian who has lived in England for 11 years. Hanif is finding living in the squat intolerable. He explains that he is an asylum-seeker and his immigration status is being investigated. Every month he reports, as required, to the immigration authorities in central London. It seems he has been waiting years for his application to be resolved. My colleague Sarah takes some details so she can follow up with the immigration authorities to find out why his case is taking so long to reach resolution. She asks him if he is working and Hanif wrings his hands with remorse because, indeed, he has been working occasionally which his status as an asylum-seeker does not entitled him to do. I speculate mordantly that here in the surreal unreality of the underworld it is perversely logical that undertaking paid work in order to avoid utter destitution should be a shameful thing to do.

We have spent an hour in the squat and all of us are eager to return to the other world. A couple of large rats have been seen snuffling their way through the piles of rubbish and the stench of the garbage feels as if it has seeped into our clothes. We return with relief to the streets, thronged with people making their way home from work.

Last week we submitted our response to the government’s consultation on squats. We do not support the option of criminalising squatting. The squatting debate has polarised around stereotypes. There are the squatters as aggressively interlopers who invade your home and change the locks when you are on holiday. Or there is the squat as the communal nirvana full of caring, sharing individuals who, without the option to squat, would be on the street.

Our reality is that many squatted buildings are death-traps and we routinely witness living conditions that go beyond wretched. Little wonder that one of the closest working relationships that the outreach teams have is with the London Fire Brigade, called with frightening regularity to tackle fires within derelict buildings inhabited by people at risk because they are under the influence of drink and drugs. The focus must be on enforcing effective and humane squat closures involving outreach teams, environmental health and the police. There are excellent examples of such closures taking place leading to the inhabitants being given help with substance misuse problems, support to return home and assistance to find more settled accommodation. Derelict buildings must be properly sealed up and protected to prevent them becoming re-squatted and brought rapidly back into use through a mix of threat, including the enactment of Compulsory Purchase Orders, and incentives such as interest free loans.

Later that evening, I am at the bathroom sink, trying to remove an invisible, but pungent substance from my forearm, an unwelcome present from our visit. My head is full of images from the squat but there is one in particular that feels burned into my memory. As we spoke to Hanif with night falling, the profile of his face moved from shadow into the light and I saw that his cheeks were glistening with tears. And I became aware that whilst he had been telling us his tale, this desperate man had been silently weeping.

[This piece was published in Inside Housing magazine on October 21st 2011]

At the Soup Run

2011-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

A fine drizzle has started and the crowd waiting on the street close to the Westminster Cathedral piazza in Victoria is slowly growing, even though the first run is not due for another hour. Clusters of eastern European men are quietly chatting. There are a lot of people standing alone wearing rucksacks or clutching plastic bags, pressed against buildings, trying to stay dry. Jacqui and Tommy are sitting cross-legged on the pavement. They seem an incongruous couple. Jacqui has been sleeping rough in London for a few months having fled Glasgow after breaking up with her violent partner. At times it is difficult for me to follow Jacqui’s guttural Glaswegian but it seems that she has been asked to leave a number of hostels and day centres because of her behaviour and was even banned from the entire Victoria area for a while and forced to move over the river to Vauxhall. She is unconcerned by this reputation for aggression and intends to continue sleeping rough as there is nothing for her in Glasgow. Tommy shakes my hand warmly. He has the nodding dog motions and unfocused eyes of the heavily inebriated. Tommy’s story is that he had a flat in Hackney but some unwelcome guests took up the floor-boards and did other damage which led to him having to leave.

We are shortly joined by Deeta, a woman of Indian descent who enters the conversation by noting that she ‘scrubs up well’ despite having to sleep rough. She does indeed seem immaculately dressed and when she uses this phrase again later in the conversation, it leads me to wonder if she is really living on the street. The soup runs attract a wide range of individuals with different needs for whom this congregation of people offers company and the opportunity to act out a role in a dramatic setting. It seems that, perversely, mass destitution brings with it a certain allure. Deeta talks about a family home in Belgravia and a husband who has thrown her out. Her discourse becomes increasingly obscure. She speaks as if we are confidantes who have a special understanding of life’s mysteries and I don’t feel able to confess to her that for large parts of the conversation I am hopelessly lost.

Next on the scene is David, neatly attired in a suit and tie and holding a book of poems which turn out to be his own poems. He is no longer homeless himself and is part of a church - the Church Without Walls - which dispenses soup periodically on the Cathedral piazza. I make the mistake of asking him where his church is based. ‘Nowhere and everywhere’, he tells me. The others in the group chortle at my error, pointing out that the answer lies in the name.

But now there is a burst of activity, a car has arrived and the scattered groups of people are coalescing to form an orderly queue. The Church of the Sacred Heart is here, having driven in from Wimbledon. They have been dispensing soup, tea and food in Victoria for many years. Slowly the queue shuffles forward, each person receiving tea and sandwiches from the volunteers.

The Church of the Sacred Heart has still to complete its work when a further commotion announces the arrival of the next soup run. Volunteers from the Coptic Church have arrived in two cars and groups have gathered around the open boots of each. Bags are dispensed to each person containing a sandwich, non-alcoholic drink, piece of fruit and packet of crisps. The Coptic Church volunteers think I am one of the homeless. They thrust a bag into my hand and invite me to join them in singing songs of praise, due to commence shortly outside the nearby Café Nero.

On introducing myself we discuss the proposal, backed by the influential Soup Run Forum, that soup runs should no longer operate in the vicinity of the cathedral piazza in order to bring respite to local people living in an area visited by soup runs for over twenty years. The Coptic Church is sympathetic to this request. They understand the issues for the local community and are mindful of the possibility of a byelaw being imposed if a voluntary, self-regulating solution doesn’t prevail. They assure me that this is the last time they will be dispensing food and soup near the piazza and next week will find a new site, indeed may even move to an indoor location.

There has been much debate about the role of soup runs. The threat of a byelaw to prevent the distribution of soup and other handouts in the cathedral area of Westminster has led to passions running high. Liberty, which is campaigning against the proposed byelaw, has adopted the slogan ‘no one sleeps rough for a free sandwich’. It is a slogan which is bafflingly inconsequential. The shared view on both sides in the debate is that the majority of people attending soup runs are not rough sleepers and the causes of rough sleeping are many and complex.

From the point of view of the soup runs, their worth is evident through the size of the crowds that gather to receive the food and drink they dispense. And it is true that, on the night I was in attendance, by the time the first soup run showed there were over 60 people waiting patiently for its arrival. The soup runs believe they provide essential sustenance for people with few resources, as well as companionship. Their work is a visible demonstration of compassion. And as for the faith groups that comprise the majority of the soup runs, they are undertaking a sacred duty to minister to the poor.

For those of us viewing the scene figuratively and literally from the other side of the road it is the irrationality of the soup run response that is bewildering. Why can’t the soup runs operate from within a building where help can be given that goes beyond the provision of food and drink, on matters connected with health and access to accommodation for example, rather than requiring people to queue publicly in locations open to the elements? And why do soup runs wish to travel into central London, often from considerable distances, when there are issues of poverty and homelessness that need tackling in their own localities?

Night is drawing in and I’m thinking of heading home when I recognise one of the local residents resolutely winding her way through the soup run crowds. We discuss whether, in her eyes, there has been any change to the scene that she has witnessed over many years and I am not surprised to hear that the answer is ‘not yet’. After all, I have seen two soup runs in action myself tonight and I’m told by those who have gathered that another two are expected. I am reminded of the phrase heard frequently over the years from homeless people, that ‘you won’t go hungry in London’. She speaks of the mortification of an elderly resident who observed from her window a person who had just used a soup run openly defecating on the pavement. And it is a truth that must be universally acknowledged that where large numbers of people gather to eat and drink with limited toilet facilities, observable quantities of excrement and urine are likely to be in close attendance.

A light drizzle has started up again as eventually I head off to catch a bus home. The groups are dispersing now and many people, like the soup runs themselves, have long distances to travel. It is bemusing that, like a flame attracts moths, this part of central London should draw so many people to it; not just the destitute, but those in search of them. I feel suddenly weary and demoralised. There is a fascination in meeting so many strange and intriguing individuals at the soup run. The sheer drama of the scene and its compelling actors is seductive. But this is the summer of 2011 and I have witnessed the mass feeding of the poor on the streets of central London. There has to be a better way.

Friend of My Youth

2011-04-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Although the secondary modern school to which I was consigned from age eight to eleven provided a quality of education that ranged from adequate down to dismal, the standard of football played was considerably better, even half decent. Nothing was more competitive than the annual matches between the school ‘houses’ named after the planets, Mercury Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn. In my last year I captained the Mercury team to, embellished through my sepia-tinted memories, a stunning 4-3 victory over Jupiter in a tense final. Key to our victory was the performance of a hard tackling right-back, William Bentley.

In my mind’s eye, there we all are with our arms around each others’ shoulders, bouncing up and down in jubilation and William Bentley is on the far left, part of the group but just slightly detached and he is looking across to seek affirmation from the rest. But I think that my memory is selective, separating him from us because of what I now know.

At school William Bentley was undoubtedly a loner and I always felt that his school-life was made difficult because his father, allegedly a German émigré who had fled the Nazis, was the head of the school’s English department. In 1986, eleven years after leaving school, I was working as an outreach worker in central London. As part of our weekly routine we undertook to visit the Passage Day Centre for the homeless in Victoria. One morning as I was finishing a shift I came across William Bentley, alone at a table packing a rucksack. I started from the assumption that he was a Passage volunteer working with the homeless, but it quickly became clear that he was a user of the day centre, a homeless person. We talked briefly about school and what had happened in the intervening years. He told me that he had found it hard to settle and spent a lot of time hitching up and down the M1 motorway. It felt to me that he was restlessly seeking for some direction in life. Aren’t we all, I mused later in an attempt to rationalise our encounter. I concluded that his itinerant life-style was a temporary aberration. Later, when writing up notes of the session at the Passage for my outreach colleagues, I omitted to mention our shared history.

In December 2010, a bout of brutally cold weather bringing snow and below minus temperatures persisted for almost two weeks and Thames Reach’s Street Rescue Team was exceptionally busy, helping people into shelters set up as an emergency response to the harsh weather conditions. Leaving the office late one evening I was waylaid by Eric, one of the outreach team. He asked me to speak to the man in reception who was waiting to be taken to a shelter. ‘He’s name-checking you - reckons you go way back’. The man looked exhausted; his face was grimy. He was slumped in a seat and struggling to stay awake. I asked him where he knew me from and he mentioned my home town. It was William Bentley, now more than 25 years homeless. I had been wrong about homelessness lightly brushing him before he found stability, companionship and security. Had I really known in 1986 that this was wistful thinking? We talked cheerily about school, the weather, shelters and the idiosyncrasies of life. It was difficult to pin down why William had been homeless for so many years. It seemed that at different times he had managed to settle for short periods in accommodation. But always something happened, bills couldn’t be paid, neighbours were difficult, relationships didn’t work out as expected. Then, to his consternation, he would find himself homeless again. It was no surprise to me to find out that our street team had met him sleeping rough not on the street with other rough sleepers but on the ‘bendy-bus’ night buses that transect London, notorious as night-time carriers of the desperate and rootless seeking warmth and anonymity. Before parting, I tentatively asked William whether his father, who had taught me English, was still alive. William’s response was matter-of-fact. ‘Apparently he died in 1987’. This short sentence, over-flowing with so much unstated significance scraped my brain like fingernails down a blackboard. We left it at that. Later as I got on the train to continue my journey home, a great glob of emotion rose up within me as I remembered the way we were.

In the following days, I spoke to the outreach workers about William, aware that I was surreptitiously plotting his progress. I was conscious of a range of feelings which included concern for his well-being but also a sense of embarrassment about my association with him that initially stayed buried and unacknowledged. Secretly I felt irritated and a little ashamed about this. Almost 100 of my colleagues are former homeless people. I urge them to speak openly, even graphically, about how it feels to have been homeless and how they escaped homelessness. They are positive role models and we know that the experiences they have had can lead to a very special interaction between them and the service users they support. In essence, the experience of homelessness can become a potent force, inspiring remarkable progress in the lives of others.

But William represented something very personal to me and I found myself murmuring the phrase, with conscious irony, ‘it’s too close to home’. And I became icily aware that it is easier to speak about homelessness in hindsight – as once was but isn’t now – and more difficult when it’s still a current state and feels like – well, an indelible stain. I thought once more about those people I have known who sleep rough and work. Their lives are necessarily duplicitous. Usually they choose not to tell their employer that they are on the street and I understand how this is rational and sensible. Even if the employer is understanding and tolerant, with the imparting of this information future interactions become corrupted; everything done or heard filtered and re-ordered through the prism created by this shocking knowledge.

There was a yet stronger emotion at work for me than embarrassment and this was guilt. It was something I had witnessed frequently in my contact with the families of rough sleepers. The ignominy of homelessness can create great pain for the nearest and dearest in different ways but I have always believed it is guilt which, often unfairly, makes the deepest cut. It remains inexplicable to most people that anyone should spend months or years sleeping in a shop doorway on cardboard under a thin blanket, and if they do that person must in some way be unwell, unloved or both.

In 1987 I was working with a rough sleeper called John Hamilton who slept rough on the south bank of the Thames under the Queen Elizabeth Hall. John was a quiet, independent man who worked as a local authority road-sweeper. After many months of waiting we were eventually able to secure a council flat for him. Distressingly, within weeks of him moving into the flat he died suddenly from ‘natural causes’ though, as always in such circumstances, I wondered how much his rough sleeping life style had led to his death aged just 59.

Slightly to my surprise it transpired that John had four children, one son and three daughters, all living in the United States and they duly flew over for the funeral. I met his son at our office. I remember him as a big man, also called John, sitting uncomfortably in his suit and tie, over-dressed for the unusually mild weather we were experiencing that spring. It soon became clear that John Junior had no idea what we did or of the nature of the relationship between his father and me. I gently explained that I knew his father ‘when he slept rough’ but this term clearly meant nothing to him. So I gave him the details. Your father slept out on the street in all weathers with dozens of other people. He queued up every night at the Salvation Army soup run. It took me many months to persuade him to come in out of the cold. He was a proud and independent man. By now John Junior had rocked forward with his head between his knees, palms of hands squeezing his temples. For a moment I thought he was going to retch. He looked up at me beseechingly, his pallid face covered in a sheen of sweat. ‘Please, please, please, my sisters must never know this’ he said. ‘We are a rich family. I have done well and have a flat in London. Dad could have moved in at any time’.

At the funeral, I kept my side of the bargain and described myself as an old friend of John’s to the three tearful daughters. John Junior promised to send a large donation to Thames Reach. It never arrived and I was glad, because it would have felt as if he had bought my silence.

Once again I go down to the room where our Street Rescue Team is based to speak to Gareth who is working with William. I don’t mean for my interest to make William into a special case, but I must know what is happening, it’s gnawing away. My studied nonchalance doesn’t fool Gareth. The latest news is that William was due to view a flat in the private rented sector but for various reasons the viewing couldn’t take place. Gareth is confident that William will soon be somewhere more settled. No longer will he have to resort to pretending to be a normal traveller on the night bus, grabbing slivers of sleep whenever he can. This friend of my youth. I’m aware as I listen that I’m tightly gripping the arm of my chair. I desperately want him to find stability and contentment. I want him to be fine and for everything to turn out right. Not for him – for me.

It won't be an ex-banker curled up in that shop doorway

2011-04-04T01:17:00.001-07:00

A woman from the Sunday Times rings. Her voice possesses those quintessentially middle class inflections of the broadsheet journalist. ‘Have you perchance come across a banker sleeping rough?’ she asks. ‘After all, the cuts are hitting us all. Homelessness doesn’t discriminate – anyone can become homeless’.

We have been here before and a familiar ritual ensues. I walk down three floors to talk with our Street Rescue Team which works on the streets with rough sleepers. ‘Any bankers out there yet’ I ask. ‘Afraid not’ I’m told. ‘We’re working with a lot of people who have done casual work in bars, an ex-security guard and a guy who used to be a roofer, and a shed-load of people who have been unemployed all their life, but we’re fresh out of bankers and are not expecting a new stock in any time soon’. Rueful smiles all round.

It made me reflect again on the assertion, frequently made, that anyone can become homeless. If only we could genuinely claim that homelessness is indeed an experience that can randomly hit anyone, regardless of class and income. But the reality is that homelessness, and especially its most extreme manifestation, rough sleeping, is highly discriminating. The evidence we have is that the vast majority of rough sleepers come from social classes D and E. Where they have had jobs they have been of the semi and unskilled manual variety. Occasionally we also come across a few C2s – skilled manual workers. In short, the people we meet were frequently experiencing poverty long before they became rough sleepers. Even those from central and Eastern Europe, currently comprising over a quarter of rough sleepers in the capital are predominantly from poor rural communities.

As an outreach worker in the 1980s, the middle class rough sleepers I met remain memorable because they were atypical. One such person was Robert Andrews, a dapper former lecturer in electronics who persisted in dressing in a suit and was inseparable from his battered briefcase. Robert suffered from ‘mental health issues’ and spent his days in the House of Commons, speaking to various MPs. Mrs Thatcher’s PPS at the time, Michael Alison, showed him inordinate respect and kindness. During weekday evenings Robert played the arcades around Piccadilly and made enough money to book into a half-decent hotel in Bloomsbury every weekend where he stored an ancient type-writer. During the week he dozed fitfully at night on an upturned milk crate inside a telephone kiosk on Embankment Place.

We intone the mantra that anyone can become homeless for all the right motives. ‘There for the grace of God’ is the well-meaning sentiment. I sat recently at a gathering of business leaders, all eager to support the homelessness sector; good men wanting to understand and help. From the top table, our host reminded us that ‘any of us could become homeless and that we are all just two pay-checks away from homelessness’. In the front row sat some hard-bitten leaders from homelessness organisations and in my fantasy a thought-bubble arose over each sceptical head which said, ‘I don’t think so’. His intentions were admirable but, let’s be honest, those cuff-links alone would have cost four weeks of Job Seekers’ Allowance.

A typical rough sleeper will often have experienced dysfunctional family relationships, suffered a disrupted education, had early experiences of the criminal justice system, misused alcohol or drugs and suffer from low self-esteem and poor mental health. The most recent statistics for London illustrate the brutal reality: 38% have been in prison, 50% have alcohol problems, 38% drug problems and 35% suffer poor mental health. A rational approach to ending rough sleeping would therefore involve investing in ‘upstream services’- family mediation initiatives, Sure Start children’s centres, prison resettlement services, early intervention mental health projects and substance misuse treatment programmes. Ominously, these are the very services that, across the country, are the focus of some of the most devastating public spending cuts and it seems highly likely that, as these cuts bite, the level of rough sleeping in this country will increase as a consequence. In contrast, I suspect that if the government’s £200 million mortgage rescue scheme was withdrawn, this might lead to more families becoming statutorily homeless and forced to move into temporary accommodation, but would not in any significant way impact on levels of rough sleeping.

So it seems to me a misjudgement to associate rough sleeping primarily with the lack of a home. For the vast majority of people living rough on the street, the complexities of their lives stretch leagues beyond the mere matter of housing. Recently I was in central London, accompanying an outreach worker on her evening shift. The 19 rough sleepers we met she knew well. Most had lived on the streets for months or years and been offered help to secure accommodation on numerous occasions. Each had a different reason for refusing assistance, but if there was a connecting thread between them it was the shocking extent of mental ill health that I witnessed. We crouched down to speak to a middle aged man laying supine under a thin blanket. He was disorientated, smelt badly and his broken English indicated that he was a long way from his home and family. And I reflected that, whilst the stigma of homelessness means that all homeless people may be unequal, it is unquestionably true that some are more unequal that others.

A version of this blog was published in Inside Housing magazine in March 2011

The Bitter Taste of Defeat

2010-08-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

When Jane, Stephen’s support worker rang me to say that Stephen was dying, I thought she meant he might be dead in two months. I said I would visit him the following week. I had last seen him six months earlier. He was slightly drunk at the time and his skin a bit blotchy, yet he was cheerful, with ambitious plans for improving his flat. I was shocked by the news and talked on for a bit, but at the other end of the phone there was one of those jarring silences when you suddenly realise that you have missed the point. ‘No, no, he’s dying now. You need to see him today’.

So I cancelled my morning appointment and took the train to West Norwood. As I came off the train I could see the ambulance outside Stephen’s block. Inside the ambulance they were busy making him comfortable on the stretcher bed. A mask was clamped to Stephen’s face and his breathing was accompanied by a sickening rasp. He was a stomach-churning yellow-brown colour, the colour of someone whose liver is damaged beyond repair. The ambulance crew allowed me to stay in the ambulance as, with siren shrieking, we raced through south London. I squeezed his hand and he silently wept. ‘This time I’ve gone too far’ he said, and it was difficult to disagree, though in fact Stephen lived another ten days in hospital before eventually dying. He was 52.

Over the coming days, we talked a lot about Stephen who I had first met when he slept rough in central London in the 1980s. I felt wretched that I hadn’t realised how ill he had become. How was it, I asked Jane, that he deteriorated so rapidly? His drinking had been getting worse but then he moved onto ‘the cider that’s never seen an apple’ she noted bleakly.

Ah, the cider that’s never seen an apple. The white super-strength ciders, favourite tipple of street drinkers, along with the super-strength lagers. White Ace currently leads the way. A litre of this pernicious fluid costs around £1.15. The white ciders are mostly 7.5% in strength, and the lagers – Tennent’s Super, Kestrel Super, Skol Super and Carlsberg Special Brew, are a massive 9%. These drinks are extraordinarily strong, remarkable cheap and absolutely deadly. In fact the white ciders do contain a form of apple but are a completely different product to the real ciders made from 100% apple juice. Instead, they are made from dry apple pulp and apple concentrate with most of the alcohol provided through the addition of glucose or corn syrup. It is remarkable that the cider industry has allowed these grossly inferior products to be described as ciders and for the brand to be tarnished as a consequence.

Thames Reach has campaigned relentlessly against super-strength ciders and lagers since 2005. Every year in projects for the homeless across the country there is a cull of homeless men and women who die an early and often excruciatingly painful death as a result of the damage caused by these drinks. It wasn’t always like this. The rise of the super-strength drinks is a relatively recent phenomenon. When I was a street outreach worker in the 1980s they were virtually unknown. Of course, alcoholism amongst the homeless is hardly new. But what is different is the speed of the deterioration caused by the super-strength drinks. Consuming them is akin to pushing the fast forward button on your life. The damage is rapid and relentless. The vital organs, notably the brain and the liver, are quickly damaged beyond repair. The age of death is usually the forties and early fifties.

I would be in denial if I were to pretend that our campaign has been anything other than a failure and this despite the fact that the solution is obvious and backed up by incontrovertible evidence. Every major piece of research into consumer behaviour relating to alcohol shows that consumption is sensitive to changes in price. If the price of super-strength drinks was at to at least double so that, for example, a can of Tennent’s Super cost £2.30, then people seriously addicted to alcohol would move over to weaker, cheaper lagers and ciders. It is so much easier to help people take further steps towards abstinence and recovery from the platform of weaker alcoholic beverages. The rate of deterioration slows and behaviour improves. The campaign has received welcomed support, notably from GPs, health workers and frontline staff working with the homeless.

It is a campaign that has suffered through my own naivety. At an early stage a sceptical colleague gave his opinion that the government was in thrall to a drinks industry that would never countenance the kind of price hike we proposed. Over the past five years I have had a lot of contact with representatives from the companies in question and with the Portman Group representing the responsible drink companies, which include those producing the super-strength lagers. On a number of occasions in ‘off the record’ conversations, representatives from the industry have told me how they, personally, agreed with our position and that the heavy price we pay due to the availability of cheap super-strength alcohol, measured by the impact on health and increased anti-social behaviour, is unacceptable and unsustainable.

In 2008 we made an official complaint to the Portman Group about the marketing of super-strength lager. Our case was based on the contention that to produce these drinks in 500ml cans, requiring the drinker to consume 4.5 units of alcohol and therefore go beyond the daily safe-drinking limits of 2-3 units for women and 3-4 units for men, encouraged binge-drinking and drunkenness. We lost, of course. The Portman Group concluded that it was difficult ‘to make a reasonable and objective distinction on responsibility grounds between a can of strong lager and …..other types of drinks container’ citing a bottle of wine as an example of a container that, like a can of Tennent’s Super, wasn’t easily re-sealable. I debated this issue a few weeks later on the Today Programme on Radio 4. ‘Don’t you put a cork in a wine bottle to re-seal it?’ asked the presenter Ed Stourton. I almost felt sorry for the Portman Group representative, squirming with embarrassment as he sought to defend a judgement that was bizarre and illogical.

The complaints panel did however have some criticism for the producers of Kestrel Super. The panel was of the view that the packaging of the product included too many references to the strength of the drink and that this was reinforced ‘by the prominent stern image of a kestrel on the can’s front’. (I kid you not). They asked for changes in the packaging. As a shabbily blatant attempt to placate a complainant by offering up a change of breathtaking irrelevance, this example must surely win top prize.

There is just one piece of good news. One of the white ciders, White Lightning, often referred to by street drinkers as White Frightening because of the feelings of paranoia it brings on, has been taken out of production. Creditably, the company that produces it, Heineken, cited the need to reinforce its stance on responsible drinking as the reason for taking this step.

But here we are in 2010 with super-strength ciders and lagers continuing to lead the way as the most deadly of the drugs that cause death and mayhem amongst the homeless population in this country, ahead of both crack cocaine and heroin by a country mile as measured by number of lives extinguished. Despite the Conservatives in opposition unveiling what at the time (August 2009) the Daily Mail called radical plans to crack down on binge-drinking culture by trebling taxes on the super-strengths to increase the price of a can of super-strength lager by £1.30, ours is a campaign that has no more than ruffled the feathers of the drinks industry and failed to persuade the government to take a step that carries with it the politically potent taunt of the nanny state in action.

I’m sitting outside a café near Aldgate East tube station with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. It is only 7.30am but he staggers drunkenly towards me clutching the familiar can with that logo which we will forever refer to sardonically as the stern kestrel. He finds a step on which to slump and his body sways downwards towards the pavement as if a great weight is attached to his forehead. I am practiced at looking behind the grime now. He may at first sight look 55 or even 60, but I can see that he is actually no more than 35. He tries to focus on the people scurrying past, who eye him warily. He bellows. It’s the most dismal sound. Later he will lay prostrate in Altab Ali Park, stepped over and passed by. Within ten years, unless by some miracle he can stop drinking, he will be dead. There may be more battles to come, but for the moment my coffee tastes very bitter. It is the bitter taste of defeat.

Community leaders never call themselves community leaders

2010-05-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

There they are, the heads of charities, local authority representatives and the odd famous entrepreneur, meeting David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the pair’s first joint public engagement following the formation of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. A full page spread in The Independent shows the redoubtable Camilla Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company to David Cameron’s right. Others in the group intently listening to the Prime Minister include Rob Owen from St Giles Trust and Lord Victor Adebowale from Turning Point. These, we are told, are the community leaders invited in at an early stage to meet the new government, an action intended to illustrate to all the importance of the vision of a ‘Big Society’ driven by community action and social enterprise and the importance of ‘civil society’ organisations, formerly known as the third sector, in helping to achieve this vision.

The community. A term used with stupendous frequency, often to add legitimacy to a course of action or view relating to a matter of national, regional or local importance. The community is cohesive, benign and right about issues as it offers the shared and therefore authentic view of ordinary people on the ground. The community is not to be confused with the mob. This is a group of people, often from the same locality, who get together to behave irrationally and aggressively; to shout at murderers being driven away from court in a van for example, or to track down and punish alleged paedophiles on estates.

Civil society organisations are regularly spoken of as community organisations. The government, heavily influenced by Iain Duncan Smith the new Secretary for State for Work and Pensions, is particularly eager to engage with those charities which are community based. In his recent impressive speech in which he sets out the government’s priorities in the area of employment and social inclusion, Iain Duncan Smith tellingly refers to ‘community charities’. What does he mean? Perhaps he wants to separate these natural Big Society allies from the mega-large charities that, so the story goes, are impersonal, have lost touch with their grass-roots constituencies, manage multi-million pound budgets and are indistinguishable from bureaucratic, public sector bodies.

Amidst the pervading bonhomie that is always in evidence when a new government comes to power, an inconvenient contradiction exists that twists uneasily in the minds of many charity leaders. It is this. Frequently local communities are hostile to our organisations and show scant sympathy towards the people we help and support. Indeed, the gestation of many charities is associated not so much with the need to address a problem arising organically from within the community but to protect and support a minority group treated with suspicion by mainstream local opinion and, in extreme cases, subjected to vilification.

Take Kids Company for example. I live in south London, close to the main base from where Kids Company operates. I am grateful for the work the organisation does with some of the most needy and chaotic young people in the neighbourhood. But does the local community embrace Kids Company? There is respect perhaps, and an acknowledgement that a genuine need exists that someone has to meet. But the cause of supporting children from broken homes, some of whom are committing petty crime and engaging in anti-social behaviour, is not one naturally embraced by large swathes of the community in my part of south London and the Kids Company philosophy, based essentially on the premise that these kids need more love not more chastisement, sits at odds with the view of many.

The work of St Giles Trust raises similar dilemmas. This fantastic organisation works with prisoners in prisons across the country and supports offenders after their release. It directly demonstrates what can be achieved by employing ex-offenders within its own work-force. Rob Owen, St Giles Trusts’ highly competent Chief Executive is driven by a belief that ex-offenders can transform their lives and once again become productive members of the community. But he and others working with ex-offenders have to battle constantly to convince others that this is an objective worthy of support. And amongst local people there remains considerable suspicion and misgivings regarding those who have ‘done time’ and a fear of crime and the criminal which commonly projects into watchful antipathy in response to those charities helping the ex-offender.

My argument is not that there is no such thing as community, as Margaret Thatcher claimed there was no such thing as society in those far off days before we were helped to understand that there is indeed something called society and that it has the potential to be big. (Follow the bouncing ball now…. Big Society = good, Big Government = bad). But I don’t believe that the leaders of charities are community leaders. Nonetheless, community leaders do exist, even though they rarely see themselves as such.

Let me give you an example. In my immediate neighbourhood in Peckham, community life revolves around the local hairdressers and the adjacent Crossroads café. This is where people naturally gather to gossip and put the world to rights. They are places to visit with a purpose, playing a role within the ordinary rhythm of life. It was my old friend Gerard Lemos, I think, who noted that dysfunctional communities were usually characterised as places which had few natural centres but often had a building self-consciously called a ‘community centre’, usually a decrepit, peeling building, infrequently used and ripe for demolition. George, who owns the hairdressers, appears to know everyone and he takes responsibility for making sure that things, in the small world which is his immediate locality, tick over nicely and that people are (there is no other way of describing it) looked after. This includes those people we like to call ‘the socially excluded’. George took it upon himself, for example, to keep an eye on Posh Tim. Posh Tim is a well-to-do chap with a drink problem who lives in a bedsit and wanders aimlessly around the streets of our part of town. He has the reddened face of the hardened drinker and a nose heading south-west from the centre of his face, suggesting that a number of drink-related adventures have befallen him. ‘He’s got a good brain though’, said George as he snipped at my hair, ‘he reads The Times you know’. How posh is that? For a while, George gave Posh Tim the job of sweeping up the hair on the floor of the salon for a few quid, but then disaster struck when Posh Tim collapsed over his egg and bacon in the Crossroads Café.

George and Ertan, who runs the café, had an idea. It involved me. With, I admit, a degree of reluctance I had confessed to George that I was Chief Executive of a local charity working with the homeless. Posh Tim might not be literally homeless but, George pointed out, ‘he’s like your lot, what with the drinking and all’, so surely Thames Reach can help him. And help him we did. Thames Reach manages a tenancy support service in Southwark. Our tenancy support workers visit and assist vulnerable people living in the community. My colleague rang George the following week and George formally ‘referred’ Tim to the service. Tim was visited, bought a fresh set of clothes, cleaned up, taken to his GP and eventually connected to the Community Mental Health Team as the underlying problem turned out to be his poor mental health.

So there you have it. There is too much expectation being placed on neighbourhoods to, through some mystical, organic ‘bottom-up’ process, run themselves and a sugar-coated view prevails in government of the essential goodness of local communities when collectively we are often intolerant and steeped in prejudice. But there is such thing as the community, there are community leaders and, at a local neighbourhood level, we do sometimes find ways of caring for our most vulnerable members. But please, please let us not pretend that the Chief Executives of charities are community leaders.

It could be worse of course. I was at a particularly tedious meeting recently, trying to stir myself from a slumber induced by the sheer monotony of the banal discourse when an esteemed colleague described the individuals around the table as ‘Thought Leaders’. I looked up to share the joke, only to find that this had been said in all seriousness. The dear old voluntary sector. When it comes to earnest pomposity, we will never be outflanked.

The Tale of Billy Rugg and the Kindly Taxi Driver

2010-03-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

‘It was the mini-milks that did me’ explained the bespectacled Raymond. I had asked him about the highs and lows of his time sleeping rough on the streets of central London. You won’t be surprised to hear that Raymond’s reminiscences covering the highs were somewhat on the thin side, whereas the lows…..

‘There were five lads and none of them could have been more than fourteen. They said they were going to get me a surprise from McDonalds on The Strand. I hadn’t eaten for more than a day and was hoping for a Big Mac. Instead they came out with a tray of those little milks for the teas and coffees with the tops all peeled off and threw the lot over me. I was soaked and as it was milk I knew it would smell too before much longer. I went off to the Passage (a day centre) to plead for a change of clothes. I felt at my lowest. It was a bad feeling having the piss taken out of me by kids.’

In my experience the petty indignities suffered by people sleeping rough often leave psychological scars that are far more painful than the wounds received through the random acts of physical violence which are also part of the rough sleeping experience. Pre-meditated humiliation meted out by those apparently devoid of conscience, reminding you that you are utterly powerless and in the eyes of some, less than human; what can bite deeper than that? When I hear a story like Raymond’s I find myself anxiously, obsessively, searching back through my memory to find an antidote - an example to counter the mortifying image of a person with nowhere to turn being shamefully degraded.

Thames Reach has a London cab, the famous Hackney Carriage which we use to ferry rough sleepers off of the street to hostels. It has our name on the side along with the logo of our sponsors. It looks exactly like any other London cab apart from not having a registration plate to the rear that proper taxis are required to carry, or the familiar light at the front that is activated when the cab is empty to indicate that it can be hailed. Occasionally we get into a spot of bother with members of the public who are not always convinced by our tale that the cab is for the exclusive use of the homeless. Returning to the cab one freezing night at Piccadilly Circus following a brief foray in search of a rough sleeper in need of a blanket, we found a well-heeled women sitting in the back. It took fifteen minutes of beseeching to coax her from the back seat as she listened sceptically to our description of the homeless underworld we inhabited, clearly convinced that this was a ruse to avoid having to go south of the river.

Back in the 1980s when I was a street outreach worker we had to rely on hailing cabs in order to get rough sleepers with mobility problems to hostels for the homeless. This was a stressful affair as, with depressing frequency, the approaching cab sped away once the driver had spotted the sorry state of one of his potential customers. Indeed, on occasions arms were nearly wrenched out of sockets as, in vain, we attempted to retain our grip on door handles to prevent the driver from rectifying his mistake and disappearing into the night.
One balmy spring evening we came across Billy Rugg. Billy was a gold card rough sleeper, one of a group known as ‘the Famous Faces’, rough sleepers entrenched in a damaging lifestyle on the street who we were particularly desperate to help indoors because of their poor health and vulnerability. Billy was in a terrible state, clearly intoxicated and pitifully confused. His trousers were sagging with faeces and urine. We checked that there was a space for him at a hostel in Covent Garden and, grimly determined, we set out to hail a taxi. For a while the usual pattern repeated itself with the taxi’s indicator light giving us hope before being abruptly cancelled as the dishevelled Billy came into view and the taxi swerved away from the curb. Eventually a cab stopped and, tenaciously hanging onto the open door, we bundled the leaking Billy inside.

As we wended our way towards Covent Garden the mild reek inside the cab grew to a nauseous stench and I began to feel pangs of guilt, knowing that this was a smell that would not later be erased with a wave of the hand. Eventually we reached our destination and, gripping Billy under the arms, we heaved him out of the cab, leaving behind a damp seat for the delectation of the next customer. Barely being able to look the cab driver in the eye I nervously thrust a note through the cab window and prepared to beat a quick retreat. ‘That’s OK mate – no charge tonight’. I was struggling to make sense of this response and asked him to repeat himself. ‘You lads are doing a great job getting granddad off the street – see it as a donation’. He drove off before I could mumble my thanks - and that was that.

Over the next few weeks we frequently found ourselves mulling over Billy Rugg’s epic journey and its surprising finale. We wondered how long it would have taken for the smell in the cab to disappear, speculated about what had motivated the driver and felt abashed that we had formerly joked that all cabbies were racists from Romford. ‘I had that Billy Rugg in the back’ we mimicked in true Private Eye style ‘and, my god, he was full of shit!’ But, most of all, we drew sustenance from this unexpected act of kindness from a stranger on our side, on the side of the homeless.

The Right to Die in the Gutter

2010-02-08T02:25:00.001-08:00

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 proximity to misery and despair does not necessarily bring out the humanity in our leaders.

This particular evening we met two men with such markedly different background and prospects that I was struck by the absurdity of giving them the same label of ‘rough sleeper’. Daniel is a young man, at almost 19 unusually young for a rough sleeper in London where more than 90% of the street homeless are over 25. He first had contact with an outreach worker just four weeks ago and was initially extremely dubious about our offers of help. Eventually he was persuaded to give us a few details about himself and as a result we were able to find him a place in a shelter in south London.

He chatted cheerfully to us in the van as we drove over to the shelter. Daniel has a small child. He has what he described as ‘personal issues’ to resolve with the mother. He didn’t have a drink or drug problem and told us he intended to ‘get my life sorted and prove to her and the kid and I can be a real father’. My colleague Paul who had spent time with Daniel considered that he had every chance of getting his life on track and predicted that we wouldn’t see Daniel on the street again. I imagined that if I met him in five years time Daniel would shake his head with bemusement as he remembered his brief, traumatic experience of sleeping rough in a shop doorway.

Over in east London we stopped the van to speak to Abdi, a Somalian with limited English who has been on the streets intermittently since 2003. Abdi is extremely withdrawn and suffers from serious mental health problems. The outreach team meets him most nights and he resists all their efforts to encourage him to come off the street. Abdi usually spends his days on the same street, surrounded by his belongings, avoiding all contact, scavenging for food. Occasionally, he goes into hospital. On this night, with the temperature well below zero, Abdi remained obdurately opposed to going into a shelter, bed and breakfast hotel or hospital. He is, beyond question, extremely unwell and at risk of dying on the street.

A brief pavement-based ‘case conference’ ensued and the outreach workers concluded that, protected by the sleeping bag they had left him, Abdi would survive the night but that there was now no other choice but to ask the local Community Mental Health Team to assess him on the street and, if necessary, take Abdi off the street against his will under a mental health ‘section’.

These are momentous decisions that outreach workers have to take, literally of the life and death variety. There is an obvious civil liberties dimension. Abdi was showing little sign that he would be prepared to leave the street of his own free will. Debate about the rights of the homeless is often acrimonious. At the end of 2009, some organisations which support the homeless produced the ‘Rights Guide for Rough Sleepers’. This intriguing guide is primarily aimed at advising people sleeping rough about rights with respect to contact with the police, rather than their rights to access advice, support and accommodation to escape street homelessness. For the outreach workers at Thames Reach this is an odd focus as we work closely with the police, trying to balance the individual needs of rough sleepers with the concerns of local communities who often equate rough sleeping with begging, drug misuse and anti-social behaviour, sometimes justifiably. Page 26 of the guide explains that under section 4 of the Vagrancy Act ‘the police can arrest you for sleeping on the street’. It is a rights guide that clarifies with precision how rough sleepers have no rights.

Before Christmas, with the mercury stuck remorselessly at minus five for night after night, the Thames Reach street teams worked desperately to help people come in from the cold. Over five weeks, more than 250 were helped into shelters, bed and breakfasts, even into the odd Travel Lodge. But on the 19th December we heard of the death on the street of Jan, a rough sleeper from Slovakia. He was well known to the teams and it was devastating news. Subsequently we learnt that he had died of a heart attack, induced by excessive alcohol consumption. We had sought a mental health assessment for Jan a few weeks earlier and, again, the possibility arose of a section if he refused to go to hospital voluntarily. The assessment did not take place as the view prevailed that Jan had made a ‘life-style choice’.

So that’s the dilemma. How can you judge if someone is so mentally unbalanced that you take the decision out of their hands? In my view, nearly all the long-term rough sleepers in London who live on the street like Abdi (in contrast to those like Daniel who make a brief cameo appearance) are in some way extremely unwell, frequently through a mix of mental health, drink and drug problems. And so, naturally, the approach of any outreach worker worth their salt will be to cajole, urge - even pressurise - them to come off of the street for good.

20 years ago I attended the funeral of a rough sleeper called John Hamilton. His son and three daughters were all at the funeral. I remember explaining how difficult it had been to convince their father that he should come off the street. He was obstinate man who I care for deeply I explained and I had to respect his right to stay out. They listened politely, but there was hurt in their eyes and suddenly I could read their thoughts. ‘Yes, but if it had been your father…’ And I knew if it had been my father I would have said ‘stop this sleeping rough nonsense dad, you’re coming home’.

‘Tis the Season for Exaggeration and Outrageous Distortion

2009-12-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

As a callow young Chief Executive I received some interesting guidance from members of the Worshipful Company of Chief Executives of Homelessness Charities. (No, it doesn’t exist, but perhaps it should). One piece of sage advice sticks in my mind in particular. Thames Reach had placed an advertisement in the Big Issue magazine one Christmas to try and attract donations. The image of a homeless man looking suitably uplifted by our assistance secured a single £15 return from an elderly lady in East Dulwich. A grizzled Chief Executive veteran offered this counsel: ‘Put a dog in the picture’. He went on to explain in his characteristically forthright way that ‘most people don’t like the homeless. They reckon they’ve brought it all on themselves. But they love animals’.

At the time I felt vaguely affronted on behalf of the Great British Public. Even though we did have space in some of our hostels for the person and their pet and could therefore justifiably include a cute pooch in the picture, I figured that we wouldn’t need to resort to these shenanigans as enough of the public wanted to help the homeless.

I was wrong, of course. In the battle to convert public munificence into a tangible financial return, homelessness charities can never compete with animal, children’s or health charities. If Thames Reach is shaking the tin at a tube station and collectors from an animal charity turn up and offer an alternative, probably our best bet is to head for home. I’m not whingeing. This is the way of the world and I accept there are many richly deserving causes. Public sympathy places children, animals and those afflicted by terrible illnesses and health problems first.

So I have enormous sympathy for homelessness charities making their pitch at Christmas-time. At this time of the year homelessness charities have some advantage. It jars when, pre-occupied by thoughts of presents and Christmas with the family, you pass someone lying huddled in a shop doorway, under a thin blanket. ‘Ain’t you got no home to go to?’ Actually: no. Somehow it seems worse at Christmas.

Homelessness charities need therefore to pull out all the stops at Christmas. And in December as their leaflets fall out of the colour supplement magazines, I become increasingly uneasy about the message we collectively impart.

Over the last twenty years we have been extraordinarily successful in reducing rough sleeping in this country. Over half the rough sleepers in England are to be found in London and when I was a street outreach worker in the mid-1980s, shamefully there were over 1,000 rough sleepers congregating on the streets of the capital on any single night including groups of over 100 people at certain locations. In the last ten years more than 20,000 people have been helped off of London’s streets through the co-ordinated actions of homelessness charities. Tonight there will still be around 300 people sleeping on the capital’s streets. So - more to do, but nonetheless enormous progress has been achieved. In contrast, New York had 2,328 people sleeping rough when the city authorities carried out the last city-wide street count early in 2009.

But to attract that donation we need to shock and appal. The impact is undoubtedly helped by Big Numbers. For these to be wrung from a scenario of steady progress in reducing homelessness, a certain degree of inventiveness is required.

The youth charity Centrepoint’s Big Number, for example, is 779. Centrepoint is a charity doing essential work. I have had plenty of contact with them over the years and been impressed with how they support some very chaotic and vulnerable young people. Their appeal material explains that 779 is the number of homeless young people ‘like Amy’ who need a safe haven at Christmas. She is 16 and ‘as temperatures drop and the streets empty out, people like Amy become more vulnerable than ever’. 779 does not correlate very closely with the number of under 18 year-olds met by street teams working with rough sleepers across London which input data on the individuals they help onto a central database called CHAIN. Over the course of the entire year 2008-9, a total of five under 18-year olds were found sleeping rough.

Some young people will have not been met by street outreach teams. For example, I heard of one young person who spent all night travelling around on night buses. But whatever way it cuts, this figure distorts the reality of rough sleeping in 2009. The monstrousness of young people sleeping on our streets has largely been ended and Centrepoint has played an invaluable role in achieving this.

Crisis at Christmas is an event that is looked forward to by many of Thames Reach’s homeless service users. They see it as an opportunity to renew acquaintance with old friends, get a health ‘MOT’ by talking at length to a sympathetic GP and meet committed volunteers who are genuinely interested in their lives. Crisis’ Big Number is 2,000 – according to their literature, the number of people who settled down to the Crisis Christmas dinner. Given that we know some 300 people will be sleeping rough on the streets when Crisis opens its doors this Christmas, we can predict with some certainty that fewer than one in seven of Crisis’ guests will be rough sleepers.

Creditably, Crisis’ literature makes it clear that the homeless in their terms includes isolated people living in hostels, squats, bed and breakfasts and with friends. All these people can attend their Christmas centres. Yet I remain uneasy about the picture we create about homelessness in 2009. In its most extreme form - rough sleeping - the size of the problem has diminished. But, it seems, in order to raise funds we have to pretend we are failing. At its worst it feels as if we are attempting to outbid each other in some perverse auction where the rules are, the grimmer the picture painted, the higher the bid you will receive. The most outrageous figure, currently being ‘re-tweeted’ with enthusiasm on Twitter, is that 1100 ex-military personnel will be living on London’s streets this Christmas. In fact the evidence of the CHAIN data shows that ex-services personnel currently form around 6% of the rough sleeping population in London. There will be some 20 ex-services personnel on our streets this Christmas. 20 too many maybe, but the reality is way, way short of this apocalyptic scenario doing the rounds.

It’s hard for homelessness charities. Despite the determined efforts of organisations such as New Philanthropy Capital to encourage donors to select and reward those charities that can evidence the positive difference they are making, this isn’t how it works in practice. Individuals frequently give as a visceral act of atonement. ‘You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good’ sings Lou Reed in ‘Perfect Day’. The glow received by doing something for someone who is less fortunate than you. I’m a good person really. You can’t knock it can you? It’s just a pity that to raise funds homelessness charities leave the public with a false impression about the size of the problem and the remarkable effectiveness of our work in tackling it.

Brutes in Suits and Hidden Angels

2009-10-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

Sleeping rough is extreme. There you are, lying on a hard pavement or in a shop doorway with, at best, a thin blanket protecting you from the cold and a piece of cardboard insulating you from the rising damp. You know it will disintegrate into a soggy porridge as soon as it begins to rain. Your isolation is profound. Yet frequently, if you are sleeping rough in central London, thousands of people will be swirling around you as they go about their business, walking on by.

Extreme things happen to those sleeping rough. They experience a range of truly remarkable responses to their predicament. Maz slept rough for a few years at London Bridge station in central London. She was seriously addicted to super-strength lager and heroin and had to beg through the day to keep both herself and her boyfriend supplied with these devastatingly damaging drugs, one illegal, the other not. Maz told me that one night she was approached by a smart man in a suit and given what is often referred to by the perpetrators of such acts as ‘a good kicking’. Waking up the next morning bruised and disorientated, she was horrified to find the man in the suit was bending over her. She tensed her body, assuming he had returned for desserts. To her astonishment he had come to apologise. ‘Sorry love, I thought you were a bloke’ he explained. Poor chap, there he was feeling guilty, assuming that the bundle he was kicking around the street was an old tramp and it turned out to be a women! How was he to know? So he returned to show that the age of chivalry is not yet dead. Such are the incomprehensible moral precepts to which some of our fellow citizens adhere.

Thankfully most of the people passing a rough sleeper in the streets don’t behave this way. In fact, many are appalled by the sight of someone sleeping rough. They ponder how such a thing can persist in a rich western democracy in the 21st century. Sometimes they see a person with a sign by them saying, ‘hungry and homeless, please spare some change’ and they drop a few coins into the cap next to it.

My colleagues from our street outreach teams which are out working every night with rough sleepers on the streets of central London frequently point out to me that most people begging are not rough sleepers, though some are living in hostels, squats or other impermanent accommodation. They are painfully aware that nearly all those who beg are seriously addicted to crack cocaine, heroin or alcohol and need the money from concerned members of the public to support this dependency.

Cheryl lives in a Thames Reach hostel where she is thriving. Formerly she lived on the streets near Charing Cross station and had a massive heroin problem. As a beggar, Cheryl was resourceful and persuasive. She had some advantages; the public has a soft spot for homeless women. Cheryl was able to cajole the public passing through Charing Cross station into handing her around £120 a day in spare change. She told me that the biggest single ‘drop’ she ever got was £1,500. Of the passer-by who gave her this windfall she says, ‘I think he must have got a year-end bonus. I couldn’t believe my luck. Of course, it was all gone in four days, spent on heroin for me and my three mates’. At this point in our conversation, Cheryl became a bit pensive and added, ‘I guess I am lucky to be alive’.

Indeed she is. A well known doctor who has been treating homeless drug users in central London for over 20 years told me that the average age of death of her heroin-dependent patients is 31. Looked at with dispassionate objectivity, I can only conclude that it’s incontrovertibly the case that the collective kindness of people giving money to people begging on the street is more damaging than the action of the thug who carried out the brutal kicking of Maz.

As in war, rough sleeping brings out the worst and the best in people. As a street outreach worker in London in the 1980s I met Dorothy Robinson every night on the Strand. She was a wizened, elderly woman who wore a bicycle helmet and her confused manner and deep suspicion of strangers indicated obvious mental health problems and a troubled past. Despite our best efforts, she would not accept our offers to come off of the streets and move into a hostel for the homeless. Slowly, inexorably, Dorothy’s physical health worsened, her face became encrusted with grime, her clothes became shabbier and her personal hygiene deteriorated. In desperation we considered requesting a mental health assessment to be undertaken with a view to having Dorothy ‘sectioned’ under the Mental Health Act and admitted to hospital against her will.

We weren’t the only people speaking to Dorothy on a nightly basis. A member of the public, Joy, was spending time with her, trying to understand what had brought Dorothy to the Strand and seeking a way of encouraging her indoors. Eventually the time came when Joy felt there was enough trust to be able to make her move. She helped Dorothy into the back of her car and drove her, ‘sitting there regally like the Queen’, over to a Thames Reach hostel where there was a single room and a warm bed.

That’s where Dorothy stayed for two years, first sleeping on the floor but eventually using the bed. Joy visited weekly and eventually Dorothy moved on to a care home where she lived in contentment until her death some five years ago. Joy stayed in touch with Dorothy at the care home. She continued to visit her weekly and remained a true friend and doughty advocate. I know all this because Joy rang me and invited me to Dorothy’s funeral where we remembered a life that was extended in length and dramatically heightened in quality by the actions of this determined and compassionate women who wasn’t prepared to see an eccentric lady in a crash helmet waste away and suffer a lonely death on one of London’s busiest streets.

Few of us can be Joys. She’s one of the hidden angels, a person so steeped in humility that she would be genuinely perplexed if you suggested that what she had done was in any way extraordinary. When the next Honours List is released with its usual quota of mediocrities receiving recognition for a lifetime of service to self-aggrandisement, Joy won’t be on it. She is special and we owe her a great deal. For her, walking on by was not an option.

My inspiration: Dennis Brown, traveller and intellectual

2009-08-07T00:37:00.000-07:00

This week, a group of bright and energetic young people from a major auditing business visited one of our hostels. As part of their corporate social responsibility commitment the company wants to support Thames Reach. The hostel residents have all spent many years sleeping rough on the streets. Sitting in the garden, our visitors listen transfixed to Michael who has the battered visage and colourful life history that fascinates, shocks and appals. They are intrigued too by the staff - and puzzled. ‘What made you enter this line of work?’ they ask. These are good people, but the sub-text is indisputably: ‘Why would articulate, educated and capable people like you want to do this work when you could earn vastly greater sums of money and attain greater status in the corporate sector’? Then, predictably, they also ask me, ‘Who inspired you?’ I can feel the short-list being shoved in my direction. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mandela? After all, dramatic work with the poor requires a source of inspiration of iconic proportions. ‘It was Dennis Brown’ I mumble feeling, irrationally, that I am letting them down.

In 1980 I fled university clutching an Honours Degree in Modern History which turned out to be of no use to man or beast. I was attracted by an advert in New Society magazine offering the opportunity to live in a house with ten homeless people for which, in return, I would receive £9 a week wages and a room. I figured that the poor could benefit considerably from my intelligence and ready wit and that my presence would undoubtedly improve the quality of their wretched lives.

The house, situated in a tawdry quarter of West Kensington, was full of fascinating individuals including Ivy whose psychotic state meant that she was stalked by two ghost-like apparitions called Jack and Marge. And then there was Dennis Brown. Dennis wore a long brown overcoat, even on the hottest summer day and in the first few weeks of my stay needed crutches to get around. Attempting to enter a derelict building via a window left open on the second floor, he had unwittingly used a ladder with a broken rung, fallen and broken a leg.

I was pleased that Dennis quickly sized me up as an intellectual, and when I told him that my dissertation had been on the Nigerian trade union movement: 1939-51, the very abstruseness of which always gave me a thrill, I felt our relative positions had been clearly established.

Shortly after, Dennis asked me if I could discuss a book with him. I had occasionally dipped into Wilbur Smith and Harold Robbins so was confident that I could do low-brow without too much trouble. To my consternation, Dennis wished to discuss Bleak House by Charles Dickens. He wanted my view on whether I regarded the book as influential in achieving reform of the judicial system in the second half of the 19th century. I had to admit to him that I had not read Bleak House and was therefore nonplussed by his question. Dennis’ wrinkled brow illustrated his great disappointment and – worse – surprise at this significant gap in my education.

Part of the ritual of the house was the communal meal, produced in rotation by house members. My early effort, a mediocre sausage stew, had been described, brutally I felt, as ‘floating turds’. Dennis’ turn was next. As I trailed around the delicatessens of West London searching for the extensive range of ingredients he required, my resentment blossomed. However, there was no doubt that the resulting grilled honey lamb chops with rosemary and whole-grain mustard was a great success. How the residents chortled as they compared Dennis’ cooking with mine.

My humiliation was not yet complete. The coup de grace was delivered at the house meeting the following week. We were planning a group trip out and I had contacted Fulham Football Club for some free tickets. Dennis fixed me with a beady eye as he proposed instead that we attend a performance of Giselle. But first he would be interested in my critical analysis of Giselle. I squirmed like a worm upon a hook to turn the conversation but eventually had to admit that I had no idea whether Giselle was a ballet or an opera. Miserably I stared at the floor as, for the benefit of his fellow residents, Dennis launched into a brief description of one of the world’s most admired ballets currently playing, he noted, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Total defeat allowed me to settle into an amicable and respectful relationship with Dennis who henceforth acted as my mentor. Near the end of my time at the house he praised me for the stability I had brought, reflected in the improvement in Ivy’s mental health. My eyes filled with tears of gratitude. Passing by six months later, I popped in to see old friends. Dennis had predictably moved on once his leg had healed fully and we never met again.

We Chief Executives are terribly important. Rubbing shoulders with politicians, opinion-formers and celebrities and strutting around the corridors of power we have little difficulty in retaining a sense of worth. Even when we are mediocre there are acolytes who tell us we are marvellous. Sometimes it all gets too overwhelming: ‘You are brilliant' our egos shriek, 'they all want to follow you!’ And then, on a good day, the memory of Dennis Brown breaks through: the cold douche of reality bringing me to my senses, the reminder that humility is the greatest leadership quality of all.

Something must be done - do charities have a collective responsibility for under-performing charities?

2009-07-28T01:35:00.000-07:00

This article first appeared in New Philanthropy Capital’s Giving Insights newsletter, summer 2009

Chief executives from the charity sector are gathering for the spring conference. They discuss their varying responses to the recession, possibilities of new business, recent pronouncements from key government Ministers - and the abject performance of organisation X. When will it end, they sigh? Surely they can’t go on providing such abysmally poor services and get away with it? The majority view is that it reflects badly on all charities; something must be done.

But this is the same conversation that took place at the spring conference the year before. Nothing has been done about organisation X and there are plenty of entirely plausible reasons why the Chief Executives should leave the elephant in the room well alone.

After all, surely charities cannot be expected to regulate each other – isn’t that the job of official regulators such as the Charity Commission? Or what about the commissioners and funders that must surely be monitoring the work of organisation X? Besides, every organisation has services that under-perform for periods of time; we should be caution about being too critical about organisation X.

But in our heart if hearts, we know that organisation X has been under-performing for years. Every time the other charities advertise a job, applications from staff at organisation X are plentiful as good people seek to flee the dysfunctional vessel. Stories emerge with depressing regularity of endless, consistently mishandled re-structuring exercises and dubious staff management practices leading to frequent employment tribunals. Governance at organisation X is famously weak with the over-bearing executive in full control. He is the puppeteer pulling the strings and the cowed trustees dance to the tune laid down for them.

In truth, perhaps regulators and funders should be expected to investigate more, to ask harder questions and to dig beneath the information provided through monitoring reports and returns. But it must also be recognised that, even for the most diligent regulator or funder, there is inevitably territory where they don’t know what they don’t know.

There may be another more visceral, sub-conscious and dishonourable reason for a Chief Executive to avoid raising concerns about organisation X. Leading a charity brings with it many vicissitudes. There are days, months, years when the sun shines but also periods of abject bleakness when projects go wrong, trustee boards play up, funding is lost, mistakes are made and reputations are on the line. How comforting it can be for a chief executive to look across at organisation X and think that, despite everything, it could be worse. Doesn’t the group always need a failing member to provide the sustenance of schadenfreude?

This, of course, is just not good enough. It would be intolerable for charity sector chief executives to set themselves up, either formally or informally, as an inquisitorial Star Chamber to pass judgement on their peers. Such an approach would be objectionable, unworkable and thankfully unnecessary. This is a sector which is well regulated and, in comparison with other areas of public life, refreshingly scandal-free. But either individually or collectively chief executives surely have a duty to have a quiet word to those who need to know – principally the regulator, when evidence emerges, building up sediment upon sediment, that suggests an organisation is behaving in a way that is damaging the reputation of the voluntary and community sector.

When an organisation is dysfunctional to this extent, the beneficiaries of the charity will invariably be receiving a service that is at best shoddy and at worst putting them at serious risk. This is the strongest incentive for taking such a step.

Instead what tends to happen is that, eventually, an internal whistle-blower takes the huge risk of contacting the regulator or a funder, an investigation duly follows and malpractice is exposed. At the next spring conference the chief executives gather. With a collective rolling of the eyes, they gravely discuss the deplorable situation that was allowed to persist for far too long at organisation X. We all knew something wasn’t right they say. Someone should have intervened earlier.

Feeble, Wretched and Hopeless

2009-07-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

There is little about the subject of homelessness which raises the spirit. The lives of homeless people are frequently bleak, often mundane; short on glamour. Consequently programmes about the homeless are rarely shown on prime-time TV. Instead they are shuffled off to the early morning or late night slot. Famous, Rich and Homeless, broadcast over two evenings in June at 9.00pm on BBC1 was the exception. It tracked the experiences of five celebrities as they faced the most extreme form of homelessness: rough sleeping. The celebrity guinea pigs were the journalist Rosie Boycott, the actor Bruce Jones of Coronation Street fame, the presenter Hardeep Singh Kohli and ex-tennis player Annabel Croft. There was a fifth celebrity, the Marquess of Blandford who, to universal derision, survived only a short time on the street before throwing in the towel and escaping to an up-market Chelsea hotel. The second of the programmes drew an impressive 4.9 million viewers.

Over the last twenty years the portrayal of rough sleeping, whether through the medium of television or newspaper features has stuck to a rigid and stultifying format in which the following combination is a standard, undeviating requirement. Firstly, the story must emphasise the sheer horror of rough sleeping. Scenes of deprivation and suffering are de rigueur. Secondly, on this foundation must be built the notion that there is no way out. The system is broken, nothing has changed since the time of Orwell, possibly even of Dickens. Finally, the homeless people, brutalised by an uncaring society must be seen as damaged, passive victims with whom we can sympathise and feel solidarity.

The programme-makers who produced Famous, Rich and Homeless adhered to this orthodoxy with impressive resoluteness. Throughout these two compelling programmes they judiciously skirted the various disobliging truths that sought to undermine this portrayal. They were assisted in their efforts by the programme’s expert ‘talking head’ John Bird, the outspoken co-founder of the Big Issue who is not afraid to wears his opinions on his sleeve. These include the view that too much money goes to emergency, sticking plaster services instead of into prevention and that the homeless who refuse help on the street are unwell and, if necessary, should be compelled against their will to leave the street and taken to a place of safety.

In the first programme, the sheer horror of sleeping rough was brought home forcefully to the viewing public. The shaken celebrities were asked to spend six long days and nights on the streets of London, trying to survive as a genuine rough sleeper would be expected to. After three days help arrived when they were teamed up with ‘buddies’, each of whom had a lengthy experience of sleeping rough. The developing relationship between celebrity and homeless person provided some gripping television. At the end of each day, talking to camera, there would be a heartfelt soliloquy from the celebrity describing the bleakness of their experience, how they quickly became invisible to ‘normal’ people and hadn’t managed to eat properly, change their clothes or take a shower.

From the position of organisations working with rough sleepers in London like my own, the kindest take on this carefully crafted portrait of suffering and destitution is that it is unthinkingly misleading. A less generous view would be that it is wilfully manipulative. Within a quarter mile of the sites selected as places to bed down by our scattered celebrities are some excellent day centres for the homeless, including the Passage in Victoria, Connection at St Martin’s at Trafalgar Square and London Embankment Mission at Waterloo. These are places where homeless men and women can not only get a hot meal, shower and change of clothes but also housing advice and help in getting off the street. But spruced up celebrities discovering routes away from rough sleeping are available and that responses to homeless people in 2009 are frequently both humane and practical was not what the programme makers had in mind when they set their destination in advance of this voyage of discovery.

To keep up this pretence required some drastic editing. The week after the programme was transmitted I met the Chief Executive of a homeless day centre at a function and asked him why the celebrities weren’t encouraged to use his day centre. His answer was that they were, and one of them had. A distraught Annabel Croft attended his day centre and a considerable amount of time was spent by a day centre staff member consoling her and offering options so that she, and her two companions, could leave the street. This inconvenient interaction did not make the final cut.

Theme two, that the homeless are trapped by an uncaring system, bolstered by the casual disregard of the public, is heavily dependent on portraying rough sleepers as forgotten and ignored. ‘Our hidden shame’ whispered a reflective Rosie Boycott. The reality is that in London and many other cities outreach teams are out working with rough sleepers every night of the year, making contact and helping them get off of the street. So it was of no surprise to me that Thames Reach’s team which covers Waterloo should quickly come across Annabel Croft and her companions sleeping rough in the vicinity of Waterloo station. On approaching Annabel the outreach worker was disconcerted to find that there was an entourage which included a crew with fluffy microphones and other filming paraphernalia. It was clear that Annabel didn’t need our help.

Nor did the two rough sleepers with her, both of whom were well know to street outreach teams working in central London. The viewing public would be forgiven for thinking that these two individuals had suffered many weeks on the street and were desperate to escape the indignities of sleeping rough on sodden cardboard, under thin blankets. In fact, one already had a place in emergency accommodation and the other had been made frequent offers of services and accommodation over a number of months which he had rejected.

In the second programme, that part of the pre-conceived structural edifice of Famous, Rich and Homeless which required services available to the homeless to be depicted as either non-existent or inadequate began to totter. Put another way, a very large cat was struggling to get out of the bag and had to be forcibly restrained. Firstly, Annabel’s commendable efforts to help one of her companions come off of the street foundered when it was confirmed by the police that he was well known to outreach teams, had been given considerable assistance in the past and was aware of the services available and how to access them.

Then, in ominous tones, John Bird informed the gathered group of celebrities that they were about to face an experience that could be even more challenging than sleeping on the street: they were going to stay in hostels for the homeless. John has a particular view on hostels. He considers that many are dangerous places where people with drink and drug problems are thrown together, producing chaos and mayhem. In our conversations on this subject, he often refers to them as ‘hostiles’. And it is true that hostels represent a basic, short-term solution; an urgent response to the extreme situation of sleeping rough. Tentatively, our celebrities arrived at the various hostels where they had been promised a bed. All seemed grateful for the decent, comfortable, single rooms they were allocated where they could rest, eat and get cleaned up and relieved to meet the concerned and supportive staff in charge.

And what about the homeless themselves? The interactions between the celebrities and their homeless companions were frequently enlightening. The warmth that developed between some was genuine and moving. The damaged lives were illuminated. The grinding battle with alcohol and drug addiction laid bare, the desperate craving for human contact exposed and the broken family relationships explained. Yet there was nothing in Famous, Rich and Homeless that offered any serious hope that homeless people can successfully escape sleeping rough, tackle debilitating alcohol and drug problems, find employment, build loving relationships, get their lives back together again. Thus, Bruce Jones finds himself in a hostel for alcoholics. He likes them but is understandably horrified by the hopelessness of their situation. ‘This is a suicide hostel, they are here to die’ he memorably bellows.

79 of Thames Reach’s salaried workforce are former homeless people, indistinguishable now from the rest of the staff group except when they choose to let others know about their experience of homelessness, when they become inspirational role models for those on the journey away from homelessness and addiction or wrestling with poor mental health. Many were once on the street fighting their demons, living hand-to-mouth. But they sure ain’t now.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Famous, Rich and Homeless kept everyone happy. The BBC can claim that they had shone a light on an area of life in 21st Century Britain that is usually ignored. The programme-makers can point to the evidence that almost five million people tracked the celebrities as they faced destitution on the street. The celebrities themselves, throwing themselves into the arms of their loved ones as they leave the nightmare of ten days of homelessness behind them will have enough dinner party anecdotes to last a whole year. The public response was almost entirely favourable, so homelessness charities can expect an increase in donations. A reminder that public giving relies less on an understanding of what charities do and more on a visceral need to give as a form of expiation.

The losers, I fear, are the homeless. They deserved a programme that would shatter the prevailing orthodoxy. One showing something which I am privileged to witness, week in and week out; namely, how men and women, against the odds, can escape the grimmest situations through their own determination and resourcefulness. Rich, Famous and Homeless was, emphatically, not this programme.

Stephen's Funeral

2009-06-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

Funerals of homeless people are frequently harrowing. I have attended too many: around three a year for the last 29 years. There is the gnawing anxiety about the size of the congregation. Will there be enough people in attendance to give them a decent send off? My worst funeral was Ken Hobart’s. When I arrived at the crematorium it quickly became apparent that I would be the only one to pay him last respects. Ken had fought with the British army during the Second World War in the Far East. It was highly likely that some of his comrades were still alive but it seems that for years before his death he was long gone and forgotten.

Unlike many homeless people he had no inclination to talk about the war, at least not to me. He was an affable man who had drifted into rough sleeping via Salvation Army hostels and boarding houses in the 1960s and 1970s. At least at the time of his death in 1994 we had managed to find Ken a small bedsit where, with a degree of comfort, he had lived out his last seven years. But to depart this mortal coil with only a care worker to wave you off is sickening and somehow I took this unacceptable departure as a personal failure.

Stephen Glanville’s funeral two week’s ago was a different affair altogether, but still one that brought its stresses. Stephen had died a month before but his body lay un-cremated while the authorities sought to trace his two sisters who were known to be still alive. I avoid using the term ‘next of kin’ because Stephen was adamant that his Thames Reach support worker Jane was his next of kin. Somewhere back in the recesses of time Stephen had undergone a massive rupture with his family and had been consistent in wanting nothing more to do with them. The sisters were traced. The silence was deafening. Whatever had gone before was not now about to be laid to rest by death.

So we gathered on a warm June morning at West Norwood Crematorium, a gaggle of apprehensive friends whispering nervously, eager to get on with it. A thoughtful, compassionate Minister spoke to us in advance to find out about the strange and turbulent life of Stephen. He wanted to keep the service simply with a few words said by a close friend rather than the full funeral paraphernalia. And so it was – and we were grateful.

I first met Stephen in 1984 as a street outreach worker at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, frequently referred to at the time as ‘Cardboard City’. Stephen was in his late-20s and part of the hard core group of rough sleepers who constructed elaborate ‘bashes’ from cardboard boxes in the small park. He was a troubled man who frequently pretended he had swallowed pills with the intention of killing himself or was heading off to hang himself from a convenient beam in a derelict building. This drama was usually placed by the various care staff who sought to help Stephen in the category of ‘attention seeking’ or ‘a cry for help’, according to how exasperated we were feeling about him at the time. Eventually, as happens with even the most chaotic and long-term rough sleeper, Stephen came off the streets, first moving into a hostel and later to a self-contained flat where he received support from a team specialising in helping people with mental health problems.

The suicide threats continued unabated, and in order to keep the level of menace high, he felt it necessary to concoct increasingly elaborate forms of suicide. Typically an inebriated Stephen would call a support worker at 2.00am to inform them that he had swallowed razorblades and had locked himself in his flat where he awaited a ghastly finale. The support worker would then call the police and meet them at the flat where Stephen, predictably, would refuse entry. Next, the door would be unceremoniously booted in by the police. We could not take the risk that Stephen might be, for once, telling the truth.

Around 1998 Stephen’s life changed. He stumbled across something called a Loving Relationship. If there is one thing that, in my experience, can improve beyond recognition the life of a homeless person it is this particular Holy Grail, sought by many but found by just a few. Stephen’s life became inextricably entwined with that of Max, a mature man of the old school with a cut glass accent, spruce and dapper, possessing the most extraordinary patience and resilience. There followed what I regard as Stephen’s Golden Age, during which time he was purposefully engaged in various activities including a local campaign to prevent the area in the front of his home from being a bus terminus. Most fundamentally, the child-like need for constant attention reduced. All this ended with Max’s death in 2004.

Homeless people frequently die prematurely and, at 52, Stephen was no exception. As with so many, it was the drink that got him. The signs were not auspicious when he moved from drinking in company at the local pub to consuming cans of super strength White Lightning cider in his flat, mostly alone. Nothing could pull him out of this fatal tail-spin. I last saw him at Kings College hospital in South London. A mask was clamped to his face to assist his breathing and he had turned the familiar, stomach-turning, yellow-brown of the drinker whose liver has packed up for good.

We stumble out of the crematorium into the June sunshine, the most motley of crews; Thames Reach staff, homeless friends, the people from the pub and neighbours who knew him simply as a friendly, eccentric, local personality. Each of us carries our own thoughts, pondering this complex, frequently frustrating character. A turbulent profusion of memories tumble over each other. We are gripped by feelings of loss, bewilderment, relief and guilt. Some remember how, after a disturbed night full of tension and worry after another threatened suicide drama they had fantasised about gripping him by the throat to press remorselessly on that fragile windpipe, letting the life drain slowly from the body…..

But here, finally, in the comfort of the pub where Stephen was a regular the stories are full of warmth and affection, the babble of conversation swells and peaks. Then, slowly, we sink back into our seats, strangely replete, finding consolation in the certainty that the world will be a poorer place without him.

Jeremy Swain 30th June 2009

Please, I beg of you, let me give you something for nothing

2009-06-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

Most days we are rung at Thames Reach by somebody who wants to help the homeless; it is really rather gratifying. Media bods come with propositions intended to shed fresh light on ‘The Plight of the Homeless’. The Big Idea often involves them sleeping rough on the street to give a ‘down and dirty’ account of what it is like to be a rough sleeper. Quite often they are genuinely unaware that a proposal of this type is put to us at least once a month. Sometimes the call is from a designer with a new invention to pilot, such as a collapsible tent for rough sleepers or a particularly warm body bag to keep them snug during those winter nights. As the vast majority of rough sleepers aspire to a bricks and mortar solution rather than a life under canvas or in a sleeping bag, we tend to give them short shrift. Some approaches are from, to be frank, cranks.

On this particular morning I seem to have been reached by a Premier League crank. The conversation went as follows:

‘Mr Swain, my name is Mr Paley and I want to give my house to the homeless for five years’
That’s very kind of you Mr Paley, what will this cost us?
‘Nothing’.
‘I’m sorry Mr Paley, I’m not with you’.
‘Mr Swain, I want eight homeless people to live in my house free of charge’.
‘Mr Paley, I appreciate your interest but most homeless people would prefer not to share a bedroom; I can’t see this working’.
‘My house has eight bedrooms Mr Swain, please come and take a look, your ex-Treasurer Terry Hitchcock has told me about your organisation and I want to help you.’
‘OK Mr Paley, perhaps we could meet at your house next week….’

Dispiritingly, the Treasurer’s name was correct. To preserve good relations with a former Board member I now had to embark on something called a Wild Goose Chase.

The address was in an extremely posh part of South London. The house had wrought iron gates, a gravel drive and a blue plaque on the side bearing notice that a famous military figure had lived, and died, in the house. Mr Paley was diffidently polite and accompanied me on the journey around his house which, in my terms, was a mansion. He explained that his wife had spotted the house from the road and fallen in love with it. He had bought it and never lived in it. These things happen. Perhaps he would sell it one day, but in the meantime he wanted the homeless to benefit. There were chandeliers in most rooms, antique furniture scattered throughout, crisp bed linen and deep carpets. At various points Mr Paley had to attend to his mobile. Then his face became grimly serious and large sums were tersely bandied about before, with an apology, he returned his attention to me.

Of course, I knew it wouldn’t work. I pictured eight unsupervised homeless people in this most beautiful of houses. Swinging from the chandeliers was just one of many possible exploits that could be visualised with little difficulty.

Back at the office it occurred to us that there was a way through it. With Mr Paley’s permission, we could let the house commercially and use the income stream to fund one of our employment projects. Mr Paley expressed quiet approval and our legal representatives set about putting in place an appropriate agreement.

Some three weeks later Mr Paley rang again.

‘I’m sorry Mr Swain but my neighbour has unexpectedly made me an offer on the house which I have decided to accept.’

It was a blow, but these things happen and I had already told myself that it was always too good to be true. But Mr Paley had another surprise in store.

‘I don’t go back on my word Mr Swain, so I would therefore be most grateful if you could give me a figure commensurate to the amount of money you would have received should you have let my house commercially over a period of five years’.

The next conversation felt, by some way, the hardest. A colleague diligently contacted a number of estate agents and, as they say, did the math. The figure she arrived at was £163,000 – and that was at the bottom end. I’ve done the fund-raising course and know the theory around making the pitch: don’t prevaricate, boldly name your figure, first speaks loses. But I still can’t do it without a nervous stammer and a feeling that I am an impertinent charlatan. It went thus:

‘Mr Paley, we are entirely honourable at Thames Reach and this really is the figure though it seems very high to me and I quite understand if…..’

Mr Paley was quick to put me out of my misery.

‘Mr Swain, I have two things to say; firstly I know that everyone working with homeless people is honourable’ (Dear Reader: I can see the thought bubble above your head: it says, this man is clever, but he has led a sheltered life). Secondly, would you be prepared for me to pay you in two instalments?’

My magnanimity knew no bounds and I graciously accepted the two payments arrangement.

There was one further meeting with Mr Paley to finalise the agreement. Earnestly I explained to him that we would give him regular updates on the service his money was supporting which we should be delighted to take him to visit. How about, I prattled, a formal report on progress every six months and perhaps some pictures of participants? It wasn’t working. He was showing signs of exasperation and suddenly expostulated:

‘Mr Swain, this morning I was meeting with young men and women in my company who think that being given a bonus of £30,000 on top of a very substantial salary is a derisory acknowledgement of their worth – please, I beg of you, let me give you something for nothing!’

We both felt shaken by his outburst and I left shortly after. We shook hands self-consciously and I have never met him again.

Over the last few years Mr Paley’s money has helped hundreds of homeless men and women increase their confidence and self-esteem, develop new skills and increase their employability. Many of them are now in work; some with Thames Reach. Mr Paley receives a yearly letter from Thames Reach but remains resolutely detached.

We can only hope that in these times when greed unencumbered by conscience seems in the ascendancy, leading to the subsidisation of duck houses, servants’ quarters and non-existent mortgages that there may be similar gestures from other enigmatic angels with a strange desire that flies defiantly in the face of the zeitgeist. Namely, without fuss or fanfare, to be able to give something for nothing.

Jeremy Swain June 2009

I'll cut my throat for you

2009-05-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

There were six rough sleepers at the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo when we got there at 6.30am on Thursday morning. The group included a Lithuanian carpenter who had got drunk in London and missed his train back to Bognor Regis as well as two Poles who conversed intently with my colleague, a Thames Reach outreach worker who is fluent in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and English. The only female in the group was a young woman – let’s call her Chloe – who swore profusely and good-humouredly at the men sleeping rough around her. Chloe’s wrist was bandaged up and her story was this: She had fallen out with her boyfriend Pete the night before and ‘split’ with him. The break-up had led Chloe to cut her wrist using a shard of glass. The Accident and Emergency department at nearby St Thomas’ Hospital had duly bandaged it up and, being unwilling to stay there overnight, she had returned to the street to sleep rough. It seemed as if her action was both a cry for help and an attempt to create a graphic symbol to reflect the trauma of the break-up which could be displayed to those around her. Chloe seemed to be around 19 years old. She was unmoved by our efforts to encourage her to return to the family home in Surrey. ‘My parents know where I am. I ring them all the time. I will go back in a few days’.

The conversation moved on to Pete, variously described by Chloe as an ‘arsehole’ ‘head-banger’ and someone she never wanted to set eyes on again. She told us that Pete had gone one step further than her and cut his throat because he was so distraught about the breakup. Well versed in the embellishment and hyperbole that frequently accompanies street stories, we thought the tale of this extreme step implausible.

After a determined but ultimately unsuccessful attempt by my outreach colleague to encourage one of the group to consider a place in a detoxification centre where they could come off of the drink we moved on to the Webber Street day centre for the homeless run by the London Embankment Mission. The centre was full; a disparate group of people living on the margins – on the streets, in hostels, in squats - were eating breakfast and sorting their belongings in preparation for the day ahead. It included older men with the weary demeanour and watchful scepticism of the long-term homeless, a table of eastern Europeans and a younger group attracted by the showers at the centre, the use of which was controlled through the distribution of numbered tickets: ‘The shower is now available for ticket-holder 258’

I was chatting with the admirably committed and knowledgeably manager of the centre when I noticed that Chloe had arrived and was tucking into an impressive breakfast, clearly enjoying the company and with a flush to her face that suggested the first drinks of the day had already been consumed. There was an edginess about the interactions at the centre that I remembered well from my time as an outreach worker. The sudden raised voices and flare-ups between individuals which subsided as quickly as they arose, with the staff hovering and watchful, ready to intervene if the verbal abuse should descend to physical violence.

The centre was emptying when Pete arrived. He stood before Chloe and raised his eyes to the ceiling, exposing his throat along which the sutures were bunched in a horizontal line, making it appear that he was wearing some kind of futuristic implanted necklace. Chloe’s reaction was a mixture of triumph and disdain. She screamed at him, calling him a nutter for cutting his throat, telling him to get out of her life. But at the same time, there was awe in her expression, even pride. It said: I am so important to you that you have ripped open your throat with a piece of glass. As we walked away from Webber Street, Chloe and Pete were in a tight embrace.

I’m not sure that the morning on the street with my impressive outreach colleague gave me any new insights into rough sleeping. The rough sleeping population around Waterloo is a tenth of the size that it was when I was an outreach worker in the 1980s. The Scots and the Irish have been replaced in part by Poles, Lithuanians and other central and eastern Europeans, though they make up no more than 20% of the rough sleeping population in London overall which is still made up largely of indigenous white males between 25 and 55. Many lives are blighted by the ubiquitous super-strength lagers and ciders that society complacently accepts as part and parcel of 21st century existence.

What I was reminded of is the dangerous ambivalence towards life on the street that people like Chloe exhibit. Incomprehensible though it may be, there is an addictive thrill for some in living rough. But like all addictions it can, at least temporarily, mask the reality – the grime, grinding monotony and casual violence of street life. And this can lead to a young woman becoming over time, in the tortured vernacular of the homelessness sector, an ‘entrenched’ rough sleeper.

We have asked the police to keep a watchful eye on the Eurostar group over the next few nights and will be redoubling our efforts to re-connect Chloe with her family.