Homeless people are not all helpless victims
Corbynite platitudes do not begin to cover the complexity of rough sleepers and their needs
On the streets of Manchester on a bitterly cold day, I met a teenage couple, in love but on the streets. Both had been in care. His leg was in plaster after a punch-up. She was on the way to hospital to be sectioned. “I’m having a bit of a mad one,” she admitted. They wanted a room in a hostel but it was full. Tory cuts, Manchester councillors had told me earlier. The young couple offered a different explanation: the hostel was filled with Eastern Europeans.
The numbers of people sleeping rough in England has almost doubled since 2010 – up 18 per cent in London alone last year according to official statistics. So why is this happening? The Left blames austerity and accuses the wicked Tories of letting the poor freeze to death on our streets. On the other hand the police in Ely this week said there are no genuine rough sleepers – only professional beggars.
A group in Torbay now claims it is dividing the homeless from professional beggars and shaming the latter into stopping by filming them.
It is time we had a grown-up debate on an issue dominated, like so much of our political life, by unhelpful language and confusion. What does it mean to be homeless and how is that different from rough sleeping, or begging? Who deserves our sympathy, and who the cold shoulder?
Jeremy Corbyn recently learnt the perils of labelling all rough sleepers as victims when he laid a bunch of flowers in memory of Marcos Amaral, a rough sleeper outside Parliament. Amaral turned out to be a Portuguese convicted paedophile, twice deported from this country. When Corbyn announced he would give every homeless person a house, was this whom he envisaged?
Homelessness is complicated. A young mother living in a council bed and breakfast with her children after being kicked out of a house by an abusive man is technically homeless, but she is not on the street. As Shelter says, “councils must help if you’re legally homeless”. The problem is that what most of us think of as homelessness is actually rough sleeping.
The majority of rough sleepers I interviewed for a think-tank report were ex-servicemen and children from care (often one and the same). They suffered from a hugely complex web of problems – with mental health, alcohol and drugs. One young woman with a Hello Kitty rucksack was a heroin addict who had been raped that morning. The average lifespan for rough sleepers like her is just 47; the national average is 82.
Chain, a multi-agency database managed by the charity St Mungo’s, estimates 7,705 folk slept rough in London last year. A startling 4,052 of these were foreign nationals; 2,337 from Eastern Europe with just under half of them from Romania. So the rise in rough sleeping, certainly in London, is in great part down to increasing numbers of migrants. Eastern Europeans, according to Chain, tend to fall into rough sleeping for the same reasons as Britons. However a quarter suffered from none of these. As one Pole cheerfully admitted to me, he slept rough in order to save money to take back to his family in Krakow. Along with the rise in migrants is the escalation of professional beggars – the majority of whom are Roma working for criminal gangs. They camp out, for example, in the tunnels under Park Lane and have little chance, as Ben Judah points out in his excellent book This is London, of ever paying back the gangs or escaping.
“The gangs have our children,” as one said bleakly.
They have transformed the Big Issue – once a lifeline – into a business, supposedly loading the magazine up in bulk from the distribution point to sell on a large-scale basis.
One in three Big Issue sellers are now Romanian. “There are hardly any Brits now,” said one man sadly, “because we are being muscled out.”
Councils have indeed had to cut services. On average, local authorities cut funding for services to help vulnerable people avoid homelessness by 45 per cent in 2014-15. But equally the Left have ignored the impact of migration on rough sleeping. And we, the public, fail to distinguish between that and homelessness, which councils are better able to handle. Both have changed out of all recognition from 20 years ago. But if we can’t tell the difference, then it’s hard to offer those who are desperate and on the streets more than a hot chocolate.