Be brave and bold and we can crack homelessness, Duke urges
BRITAIN will “never have a better chance” to crack the problem of homelessness, the Duke of Cambridge has said, as he urged: “We’ve just got to be a bit brave and a bit bold to get it done.”
The Duke, visiting a homeless centre in Peterborough this week, said the “truly horrendous” pandemic had created unexpected “slivers of opportunity” to help people off the streets once and for all.
Having campaigned to raise awareness of homelessness since he visited shelters with Diana, Princess of Wales, his late mother, the Duke said he was “really hoping” for a chance to “do something properly” to finally rehouse people on a permanent basis.
The Duke was visiting the Garden House, a drop-in support facility for homeless people, which acts as a city centre hub to provide housing, health, and substance-abuse services.
During the coronavirus crisis, more than 14,500 men and women sleeping on the streets and in communal shelters in the UK were offered temporary accommodation to keep them and other members of the public safe. However, in June, charities warned that thousands were at risk of finding themselves back on the streets as contracts between councils and hotels came to an end as government funding ran out.
Kensington Palace said the Duke had kept in contact with organisations including The Passage and Centrepoint throughout lockdown.
Meeting a group of former rough sleepers on Thursday, the Duke said: “I’m really hoping – I mean this pandemic has been truly horrendous for everyone – I’m really hoping that the slivers of positivity and the slivers of goodness that might come out of this are in the homelessness side of things.
“You’ll never have a better chance nationally to crack homelessness and do something properly.”
He told them he had heard New York was buying up hotels as permanent accommodation for rough sleepers.
“So there are opportunities here, there really are, to do this and we’ve just got to be a bit brave and a bit bold to get it done,” he added.
Rough sleepers and those at risk of becoming homeless are being helped to secure tenancies through £105million (£85million of which is new) of funding, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said.
Robert Smale, 55, who lived in a tent for more than six years after a breakup, told the Duke of his hopes for a better life, saying: “Personally I’ve got no intention of going back on the streets again. [If ] I’ve got this chance to better my life – then I’ll take your arm off, I’ll take it with both hands and snatch.”
During the visit, the Duke also took some teasing in his stride, after being told by Gary Griffiths – a lead roofer who lived in his truck for six weeks before lockdown before being rehoused – that he appeared to have lost weight. The Duke replied: “I’m worried now where you’re looking at, do I look like I’ve lost weight? Around the jowls maybe, around the chin? Maybe lockdown hasn’t been quite so bad.”
After the Duke had left, Mr Griffith, 55, said the Duke, now a father-ofthree, had told him about his younger days of hangovers. He said: “I said ‘you need a bit of pie and mash in you, fatten you up a bit’ and he said ‘don’t, I ate jellied eels on a hangover, after a bender’ which I thought was quite good, at least he’s human.”