One of our clients, Steve, had this week decorated his sleeping space with decorations he had found and was doing a collection for the local day shelter and Simon on the Streets – services he feels had helped him the most.
Yesterday afternoon the police moved Steve and his friends on and directed them to engage with the workers they were accompanied by in terms of accessing housing. They were told that they need to access proper housing and cannot remain there. Then, a council waste van turned up and threw all his stuff in the back, Christmas tree, sleeping bag, the lot. You can read about it here in the Bradford T&A Here his support worker lets her frustrations be heard.
‘What angers me the most is the attitude of enforcement of a group of people to arrive and tell Steve what to do. I’m sure they will have found him a bed somewhere, but I doubt any thought has gone into sustainability. My work with Steve has been about asking what he wants and finding out what the best solution is for him based on his circumstances. There has been no point pushing Steve into accommodation where he cannot comply with the rules, only to have him asked to leave in a few days. You might think that even just a few nights in accommodation is better than rough sleeping, but my view is that it is harmful to set someone up to fail. Not only does it affect that persons self esteem and make them feel that they have failed, but this then has a knock-on effect on their motivation in the longer term, and a person who continually gets these knock-backs or fails, generally tends to pull away from support and feel that they deserve their circumstances because they are a result of their own failure.
From a practical point of view, the more services you are barred from, the more this reduces your chances of accessing services once you have turned a corner and are ready to make those changes. I had another service user recently who experienced this first hand. He has lived in a cycle of recovery and relapse, but he never stops trying. Whenever he has had accommodation, it has ended badly, and he is now unable to access several sources of accommodation. In recent months, he really turned a corner. He was abstinent from alcohol and drugs, he was reflecting on his past choices, and was building a vision of what he wanted for the future. We were even looking a private rented accommodation for him. He was turning up for all his appointments, he was paying his bills without prompting from anyone, and I really hoped that this was going to be his big break. At this time he was in temporary accommodation pending the result of a formal housing assessment. One day he got the news that his temporary accommodation was going to end and that he would not be provided with any more accommodation because he was deemed to be intentionally homeless due to his actions in previous accommodation. The news was too much for him, he needed something to make him feel ok, and he relapsed. He is now back at the start again, rough sleeping and with an alcohol and heroin addiction.
Directing someone into accommodation might seem like the right thing, but our work isn’t about getting people into beds, it’s about supporting a person to make those changes that lead to long term sustainable change. Our job with Steve could possibly be that bit harder now if he ends up barred from yet another housing provider, and ultimately, if and when he is ready to make those changes, his past will come back to haunt him, and it will be suggested that this is of his own doing.
When Steve had originally decorated his sleeping area, he had been full of festive cheer. He said to me, “just because I’m homeless, why shouldn’t I make the most of Christmas?”. He said that it gave him a bit of a focus in his day because as people walk past they stop to chat. I just feel so angry that Steve has worked so hard to engage in a positive way, activity which can he could easily have built on to work towards engagement with services to help him with his issues. Now I fear that all of the control he felt he had over his life will have been stripped away from him again. Words can’t describe how angry I feel, I’m shaking from head to toe.’