GOVERNMENT MUST BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO TACKLE HOMELESSNESS
BIG Issue founder Lord Bird worked with the Sunday Express to help bring about a £315m pledge to help tackle homelessness. In a
New Year’s message he argues a good education and solid family life are the real keys to helping people help themselves
WE SEE people sitting in the street by ATMS with their hands out asking us for help. The help they mostly want is money. Or we see them sleeping in doorways, under plastic or in sleeping bags, always looking desperate. How have we let our society come to this?
Over Christmas a lot of people ask this question.
I have never met anyone, other than in a fictional story, who got enough money on the streets to enable them to get off the streets.
If someone asks for money, and looks desperate enough, you may well give. Often giving makes you feel better. But what it doesn’t do is give the receiver the chance of going anywhere fast.
We have not always had hundreds and thousands of people in the UK sleeping rough and begging in our high streets.
‘Vast areas of UK
were left behind’
Previous to the late 1980s it would be rare to see people sleeping rough and sitting with their hands out.
The UK changed when many of its basic industries – coal, steel, engineering, shipbuilding – closed and we moved to a service economy. We did not make things, we traded things.we bought from overseas what once came from our Northern and Midland cities.
The modern world came into shape. More and more people were trying to get on the housing ladder. People living in council houses were given the opportunity and right to buy them.
Suddenly housing and accommodation became a bigger issue than previously and expectations were raised. People wanted their own place and they wanted it to be as perfect as it could be.
Work changed and housing changed. And out of this, many people ended up on the streets.
Many were children of people living on benefitsz, because their industrial jobs disappeared. And many who ended up down and out were those that did not have the skills and education to enable them to bounce back.
Vast areas of Great Britain turned into a place of need, and drink and drugs, crime and poverty, became part of everyday life.
Out of this comes many of the problems that the Government’s “levelling-up” agenda wishes to address.vast areas of the country have been left behind, where educational attainments and opportunities have shrivelled.
So when I get asked what would I – John Bird, ex-homeless, ex-slum dweller – do? I always say “change education”.
Support children in the very early stages of their life, support parents to do a better job of bringing their children up. Stop failing our children at school – 35 per cent is the figure who come out of school with little or no sign of education and social skills.
These children are those most likely to end up homeless, end up being the working poor, in longterm unemployment or in our hospitals suffering from poor diet.
Unable to get out of poverty they become a lost opportunity in their own lives. Our prisons, like our working poor, are full of people who did poorly at school.
The UK is suffering from many of the maladies created by government not spending its money wisely.
When people say there is not enough money to spend on preventing poverty, or reforming our education system, or investing in parents so that parents can do a better job, it’s because taxpayers’ money is spent unwisely.the vast fortunes spent by governments since the 1980s, billions on homelessness alone, did not bring a social transformation.
They did not bring the better education and increased skill needed so people can make their way out of poverty.
The greatest contribution we can make now is to understand where the social money we spend is going and how much of it is wasted. How much of it is a stop gap, doesn’t help long term and doesn’t increase people’s chance of having a fuller life?
The welfare state supports many, but it can harm people’s chances. A good solid family life and a good solid education puts you on the road to self improvement. The Government should be encouraging people towards that.
It should look again at social security and how it could be used to create social opportunity.
So when people say can we end homelessness, I say, “Only if the money we spend is spent wisely on stopping people becoming the homeless of tomorrow”.
We need an audit of what works, what helps.we need a government brave enough to say the present system of spending is not delivering for many citizens.
We also need to see that letting people sleep on the streets is a human rights abuse.
We need to put these people in a place where their health and mental wellbeing can be sorted.
And we need to tell the Government to stop spending billions on slapdash thinking – preventions and not just on emergencies.
The Government has partly responded to stopping new people slipping into homelessness through losing their jobs in the pandemic. But that is only the first step.
Some real joined-up thinking needs to be coming down the line.
Happy New Year.