‘Lost and forgotten’ people are drifting through the gaps
THE door - a grimy, stomach-churning mix of stale dirt, damp and bleach.
In the living room, there are a couple of discarded filing cabinets and nothing else. No sofa, no light.
A cloud of flies bursts from the upstairs toilet. The front door is boarded up, the kitchen door permanently locked.
The downstairs toilet and shower are both encrusted with filth.
Stains cover the surfaces of every room, from floor to light-switch to ceiling. The locks on the bedrooms are broken or don’t exist.
One recent resident says a rat has recently been sighted.
Yet the landlord of this ‘bed and breakfast’ in east Manchester is collecting hundreds of pounds a month in benefit from the homeless people living inside, people who have slipped so far through society’s cracks they feel they now have only one other option: The streets.
The squalor, danger and death behind the closed doors of the B&Bs used by hundreds of Manchester’s homeless people is never seen by the public, rarely seen by the council and goes unrecorded by the government, which does not count their residents in its official figures.
But new research by the Openshaw-based homeless charity Justlife reveals the scale of the crisis hidden away in the city’s grim private guesthouses.
It estimates that if all the people living in this type of ‘unsupported temporary accommodation’ - provision for homeless people who do not tick the right boxes for official help - were actually counted in national figures, government statistics would be 10 times higher nationally than ministers currently admit.
In Manchester alone, Justlife believes it has identified 500 such people.
As they are not owed a homelessness ‘duty’ by the local authority because they are not in ‘priority’ need under national legislation, due to not being considered vulnerable enough - they have ended up languishing in B&Bs, unrecorded, ‘cycling in and out of rough sleeping’. Effectively, they are edited out.
As the country’s homeless crisis becomes visibly worse, these ‘lost and forgotten’ people drift through the gaps, finds Justlife’s report, suffering ‘great hardship, which goes largely unnoticed’.
It calls on ministers to finally sit up and take note.
“The unimaginable life so many live in this accommodation requires those in positions of power no longer to ignore them, but to include them in plans for ending homelessness,”
A six-month investigation by our sister paper the M.E.N. bears out Justlife’s research.
The precariousness and misery of existence inside Manchester’s grimmest establishments was described in painful detail both by former residents and local charities, who see a direct link to the city’s rough sleeping crisis.
For while even the worst B&Bs are providing a service to people with nowhere else to go - and their landlords are neither social workers, nor responsible for the vulnerability, drug addictions or deaths of people who live there - some of the conditions uncovered by our research are at best bleak and at worst dangerous, leading some people to opt for a city centre doorway instead. it concludes.