Last night’s Fourthought on radio 4 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0384c45 – featured Jad Adams, a journalist and long time supporter and now chair of trustees of the charity Night Watch. He spoke about homelessness and our response to it in this country.
There were a couple very interesting points that he made:
Hostel accommodation is one of the main ways of intervening to support rough sleepers. There are some good hostels and some not so good hostels, but according to Jad about a third of people in hostels move on positively, a third are asked to leave and a third move on to another hostel. So in his words: a third get better a third get worse and a third stay the same.
Access to hostel accommodation (and any ‘official’ housing’) is dependent on the individual having a right to and actually claiming housing benefit. Jad makes the point that no matter what challenges and troubles an individual faces the first ( and probably only guaranteed) support an individual receives is with filling out housing benefit forms. This is not a reflection on hostels but on a system that monetizes people who are homeless. That is to say, the support around housing (and often all the support in other areas that comes with it) is only available to those entitled to (and willing) to claim housing benefit. I think this point resonates – as a state we don’t really want to throw money away but surely we should have some capacity for compassion that means we judge peoples entitlement to support based on their needs and not on their economic viability!
We were certainly aware of a guy who was living in a bush a couple of winters ago and because of his mental health issues wasn’t really attempting to engage with mainstream services. The sad fact is because he had ‘no recourse to public funds’ those services weren’t really making any attempt to engage with him either… it was only when there was a significant risk of serious harm to him that things started to happen and only then because we were pushing very hard. There is no Simon on the Streets in most towns and cities in the UK… what would happen to guys like this in those places because they are not economically viable?