Poverty exists in places of privilege, too

Just days before Christmas I happened to be in Windsor for work. I disembarked at the Riverside station and made my way into the town centre, a short steep walk up Thames Street, which flanks the west side of the castle, founded in the 11th century by William the Conqueror.

I didn’t know then that Prince Harry would be marrying his fiancée Meghan there in May, I was simply open-mouthed at the sheer scale and majesty of the building to my left that I almost tripped over a person in a sleeping bag.

She was lying on the pavement, not by the wall, as her friend was, sitting up, but in the middle, lengthways, so pedestrians had to walk round her.

The bus shelter opposite had also been pressed into service by two more homeless people, judging by the battered shopping trolley, the bedding and detritus.

The sight gave me pause; the jarring reminder of poverty in the face of privilege was deeply discomfiting. Such disparity between rich and poor, dominion and dispossession will have been played out on those streets, by those battlements for almost 900 years. But in 2018, how should we react?

This week we have seen a range of responses, as the head of Windsor council called for the police to use vagrancy laws to clear the streets of homeless people and “aggressive” beggars who were putting off tourists and disrupting life for locals.

The charity Shelter hit back that people sleeping rough were vulnerable and need help, not stigmatisation. The homeless charity Centrepoint countered that begging and

rough sleeping were two distinct issues that should not be conflated.

Later, as I returned to the station, restaurant staff were fruitlessly pleading with the woman in the sleeping bag to move as, by then, she was blocking the door to their premises. The police who were nearby did not intervene; they insist the problem is a local authority matter.

But what is the moral thing to do? Move her 20 yards? Or 200? Pick up her sleeping bag and – then what? Dry clean it? Throw it into a skip and frogmarch her to a hostel?

We need joined-up thinking and joined-up action to tackle the intractable and growing problem of homelessness. Last month, a Public Accounts Committee found that since 2011 the number of people sleeping on the streets has increased by 134 per cent.

The government has pledged to give millions from dormant bank accounts to homelessness schemes. Some say people sleeping rough is a blight on our streets. I say it is a stain on our conscience. Let Windsor be the crucible of change.