This page is an edited transcript of a talk given by Hannah Luff at the Think Twice Conference in Cambridge, on 23 March 2002.
Homelessness causes deprivation of basic human necessities and rights. It causes sickness, it causes isolation, it causes disillusionment with society, with people around you, and it causes death. It's a very widespread problem.
As Vin said earlier, everyone has their own personal bias on every issue, and my concern is about the relief of poverty and the opening up of genuine opportunities for homeless people.
I'm not going to give you detailed statistics - partly because in my work recently I haven't had the chance to keep up to date with them, but mostly because I don't believe that statistics in this field give the full picture. They're ever-changing and always seem to be representative of people's political bias and other agendas. So the talk that I'll give will be fairly broad, and it will be from my overall perspective, which is gleaned from my work, my education, and my own personal experience.
So first let me tell where I'm coming from. I've worked as a hostel worker, as a floating support worker, as a housing officer all across London, and briefly as a volunteer for the Big Issue. I now coordinate the Cambridge Homeless Partnership, which is a membership body of different organisations within the homelessness field: I'm trying to pull them together and get them working better together. I have an MSc in Housing - I've studied housing development, and housing law in particular. And as for my own experience: when I was doing my MSc, my family and I were made homeless because the River Authority sunk the boat that we were living on. After spending my first pregnancy trying to repair it, it went back in the water and was then destroyed again. We lost all our money and ended up squatting for the first five months of my baby's life. And then we finally managed to get ourselves a new boat and move up here, which has been a brilliant start for us, and it's been a fantastic year so far.
In this talk I'd like to look at the questions of what homelessness actually is; why people become homeless, why they are homeless; how widespread homelessness is; whether there are any laws to protect the homeless; what is being done, what can be done, and what needs to be done; and why we should bother.
There are two types of answer to the question of what homelessness is. There are the legal, social, academic, and services-oriented definitions of homelessness; and then there's the experience of homelessness itself.
Homelessness includes people without accommodation; people who have no fixed address; and people with inadequate shelter. They're the main three areas of homelessness that are recognised.
People without accommodation - PWA - means literally roofless people, rough sleepers. This is the most extreme form of homelessness. It attracts the most media attention and funding because rough sleepers are in the most need. So when most people talk about homelessness, they are normally talking about rough sleepers.
People with no fixed abode. This includes people with mobile homes, vehicles, boats, "benders" (which are informal structures), tents. And these people are all considered homeless if they have no stopping place, or if they have no facilities - for adequate accommodation you need to have certain facilities, like toilets, sanitary provision, running water, heating, and rubbish disposal.
People with inadequate shelter probably represent the biggest proportion of all homeless people. This is the most widespread category across the UK, but it is often also the most hidden and difficult to evaluate. It includes people whose homes are in disrepair, or are a health risk; people who are threatened with eviction - legally you can apply as homeless to the Council if you're in threat of eviction within 28 days; and people who have no right of occupation, including squatters and people staying on friends' floors. Again, it includes people with no facilities, and it includes those who are overcrowded, or those who are threatened with violence or harassment. All of these people are considered in the media to be homeless, and they all should have some legal or other entitlement to help or support as a homeless person.
A homeless person will probably answer the question of what homelessness is very differently, because the previous definitions are very textbook, they're quite detached and not very personal. To start with, all homeless people have different experiences. You can't really say that there is a common experience of homelessness, because everyone's experience is different, because every human being is different, and everyone's situation and how they handle it is different.
Homelessness is dangerous. It exacerbates physical and mental illness, and may cause death. If someone becomes homeless as a result of mental or physical illness, it is very likely that that illness will be perpetuated. This is partly because of the lack of medical facilities and the fact that it's difficult to get a doctor when you're of no fixed abode. It's also because, in harsh weather conditions, simple things like 'flu can cause pneumonia and can kill. Simple things like not being able to wash properly mean that a lot of people end up with trench foot. The conditions people live in when they are poorly housed - there's been a huge increase of TB in this country, which has been starting to kill people. Really simple things, that should be really easy to cure, just aren't when you're homeless.
Being an outcast and a scapegoat - I don't know if you can imagine sitting out all day, every day, with people walking past you, some giving you money, some giving you hassle. But most people I've talked to who are homeless, especially people in the squatting community in London but others as well, feel that they are outside society now, that nobody cares, and that there is no point in working in society, to get back into it, because they are so separated from it.
Another aspect of being homelessness is dependency on handouts. In some ways homeless people are the most independent people I've ever met because they're amazing at surviving. But in other ways they're also the most dependent - they can't earn their own money so a lot of them need to beg. Many of them are dependent on benefits, which are very difficult to get when you're homeless because you can't prove your address, and the Benefits Agency give their staff a bonus every time they remove somebody from the dole because it improves government statistics for finding work.
People who are homeless have no private space at all. I knew one couple, a married couple, who lived for six years in the Bullring in Waterloo before they turned it into a cinema, and I can't imagine - well it's quite obvious why they didn't end up having any children. It's just the thought of not having any space. I mean, all the women in this room, if you can imagine being on your period and not being able to wash - it's really quite harsh, not having any space at all. You can't think, or rather, you have all day to think about things, but you don't have any private space to do that in.
It's difficult for homeless people to get post. That's starting to get easier now, which means that you can at times get identification. But it's very hard when you're homeless to keep belongings, which means that even if you do manage to get identification, it's hard to keep hold of it - either because there is a lot of theft, or just because in poor weather conditions things deteriorate quickly. Most identification is on paper and paper goes mouldy in the damp. It's very hard to keep on top of everything. You can't take all your belongings with you because you can't carry all that much.
You can't work because it's very easy to become de-motivated. David, my husband, slept rough for three months before he met me, and I'm very proud because he managed to hold a job down while he was sleeping rough. But if you can imagine trying to find a way to iron your shirt in the morning, when you have nowhere to keep your shirt, and trying to find a place to wash - it's really quite difficult. And it's hard to maintain routine and motivation when you're in that situation. It's also very difficult to get work, because people won't trust you if you say you're homeless.
A lot of homeless people are dependent on drugs or alcohol, to numb pain and enable sleep, or escape. I've heard a lot of people say, you shouldn't give money to homeless people because they just spend it on drugs, and to an extent that's true, I think a lot of people do. But you have to think about why these people need drugs in the first place. The two drugs that Cambridge has the biggest problem with are heroin and alcohol. Everybody knows what alcohol's like: everyone knows how it buzzes the mind and numbs pain. Heroin works in a very similar way. It takes away, in particular, the emotional pain of being left outside society, and it takes away physical pain so that, when you have health problems exacerbated by homelessness, and when you can't get to sleep at night because it's so cold, it helps you with those.
Homeless people experience an inability to keep financial commitments. It's very difficult to keep on top of debts when you have no money coming in. It deepens rifts in relationships - it's hard to keep in touch with people when you're homeless. There's also a big stigma attached to being homeless - a lot of people find that people don't want to know them any more when they become homeless. And it's difficult to eat well when you have no fridge, no cooker and no money.
People who are homeless live with the constant threat of violence hanging over them. This isn't so bad in the south, but in the north where rough sleeping figures are lower, it is so much less acceptable to be homeless that people will end up leaving pubs in the evening drunk and finding homeless people to give a good kicking to. Also, it's controversial for me to say so, but there is a lot more police violence than here, and the same is true in London. Cambridge is a relatively safe city in terms of violence. Statistics from the National Homeless Alliance - I know I said I wouldn't mention stats - but they do indicate that more violence is done to homeless people than by them. There's a lot of fear about homeless people, especially those who sit next to cashpoints and beg. It's seen as aggressive begging and people are moved on by the police. But the reality is that they probably have more of a reason to fear than you do.
It's a very nomadic way of life. Many homeless people move on a lot. Squatters are always being evicted. Rough sleepers are always being moved on by the police, because it's their job to keep the streets clear of obstruction. It's a steep learning curve for homeless people - learning to survive on their own resources and their own wits.
If you really want to know what homelessness is like the best person to ask is a homeless person, who's experiencing it now, because the situation is always changing.
There are two main categories of reasons for homelessness. There are personal and individual reasons why people are made homeless; and there are the reasons why society, as a whole, perpetuates homelessness, because of its structure.
For the individual, the most common reasons seem to be loss of job, or reduced earnings, debt, and arrears - all the financial reasons that make it difficult for people. Eviction, obviously - if someone's kicked out of their house not everybody manages to find a new one. Pregnancy accounts for a lot of homelessness. There does seem to be a huge myth that young teenage people get pregnant solely to get council housing. I don't quite follow that, but it is still one of the biggest statistical reasons for the Council re-housing people who are in housing need that they are pregnant and their families can't keep them.
Family breakdown, and relationship breakdown in general. A lot of people find that when they split up with who they think will be their lifetime partner, they end up unable to deal with the situation, and unable to cope with normal day-to-day tasks, like paying the rent.
Bereavement.
Violence and harassment. Domestic violence in particular leads to a lot of homelessness, but violence and harassment from neighbours or landlords are also quite common problems.
Disrepair of home, and destruction of mobile homes. People are considered homeless if their home is in disrepair, and quite often it becomes so severe that people end up homeless because of it.
Lack of life skills. A lot of people become homeless simply because they do not have the literacy and numeracy which is needed for filling in forms, applying for benefits, and maintaining employment.
Mental illness. A lot of people end up on the streets through depression and other forms of mental illness, especially schizophrenia.
Leaving institutions. A very large proportion of people who are rough sleeping, especially in this city, come from the army, or from prison, or leaving care. They all have particular difficulties because they've been trained to live in a certain way, and once they are no longer in that lifestyle they find it difficult to adapt to the rest of the community.
Personal choice, for those who choose to be homeless for political or personal reasons, and personal disaster - everyone has personal disasters.
I'm not an economist so please don't challenge me too much on Society's causes for homelessness. But my understanding is that with booming house prices, people can't keep up with rents and mortgages as interest rates rise. With economic depression people tend to lose jobs: businesses close down and people across the spectrum find themselves out of work, just as part of the normal "boom and bust" cycle.
Strictness of eligibility criteria for housing benefits and legal help. Most of the homeless people that I've met don't fit into the usual boxes and categories on official forms. It's very difficult to prove your need when you do not fit in to what the system itself describes as its eligibility criteria.
There's the failure of the education system. I'm not saying the education system is bad but there are a lot of people who fail in school.
There's the failure of the legal system. Again it's due to strictness of criteria. A lot of people don't fit in to all the categories, and end up homeless because they cannot be helped.
People with outstanding warrants. There are a lot of people on this country who are on the run, who've done something and find they don't want to face the music, and move out of home and travel about as a way of getting away.
Care in the community. A lot of mental hospitals closed down, and the idea was that the community would care for the people who were mentally ill. In reality that support has often broken down and people have found themselves unable to live outside the institution - having the dual problem of the mental illness itself, and having lived in the institution so long that they no longer know how to cope outside in society.
There's the lack of free detox and rehab. A lot of people who have drug and dependency problems find that they cannot afford to keep up their habit and pay their rent. And they often find that it leads to a more chaotic lifestyle, and they cannot hold down jobs or normal employment.
Society's unwillingness to trust homeless people with bank accounts and jobs. It's very difficult if you walk into a job and say, yes I'm homeless. It makes it sound as if you can't cope, you're no good, and you're not worth trusting with the task because you can't even keep your own home. It's very difficult to get a job if you're homeless. As for bank accounts, I've found myself that I'm unable to open one now because I don't have a fixed address, even though I own my own home.
Failure of Government policy. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Rough Sleepers Unit a bit later. The collective reluctance of states to take responsibility for people dispossessed by war, famine, natural disaster, or poverty - that's basically the refugee issue: if every single country says no we won't accept refugees because it's not politically useful for us to do so from this particular country, then we end up without any housing for any of these people.
Lack of properties. There are 140,000 empty homes in this country, which is enough to house every homeless household in the UK. But many of these properties have fallen into such disrepair that they're unusable. Some are on housing estates that are so badly designed they've become unsafe places to live. And many of them are in areas of economic depression, so unless the broader issues in society are dealt with, homelessness is bound to continue. People will need to escape from areas with economic difficulties, leaving homes empty in some places and attracting people to cities like this one where there is a shortage of housing and the rates are extremely high.
Homelessness is a global problem - it affects all countries. In the UK, it is most visible in the cities. It does exist rurally, but it's not monitored closely. Figures cited by the Government show a reduction across the UK of two thirds in the last two years. The figure for London is down to 550 people, which doesn't quite meet the Government's target. But it's impossible to count the real number because there are more homeless people each day, and because many homeless people remain hidden or they keep moving on. For example, there are all the people sleeping on friends' floors, and all the women running from domestic violence who find a place to stay but don't tell anybody. A lot of homelessness goes unreported.
There are homeless people from every section of society. There are homeless students and there are homeless milkmen; there are homeless dustmen, there are homeless academics, there are homeless architects, you name it. A lot of people come from the poorer ends of society, a lot of people have come from an uneducated background, but there are just as many people who have had good jobs and lost them. There are all sorts of people who are homeless.
Locally, the CATS team - which is the contact and assessment team for Cambridge - have reported an average, I believe, of nine new people each week. This has been up to about nineteen, which is the total number according to the Council: the Council counted nineteen rough sleepers in the city centre in the last recount. Now, the cynical part of me thinks that part of this might have been to do with the police being asked to move homeless people on, the day before the street count, and it might have been something to do with the Portakabin opening up just for that night at the 222 hostel. And it also might be to do with the fact that, actually for very good reasons, all the homeless people who sleep in Level D of the car park were moved on a few nights before that, and told that they would be fined £60 if they were caught sleeping there again. That was to break up that community, partly because it had become dangerous for workers to approach it, because of a few violent people within it. But it meant that homeless people were dispersed across the city, and the CATS team are only given funding by the Government to search in the city centre.
So I believe that, yes the numbers have come down, the Council have done a really good job, the service providers have done a really, really good job in the City bringing the numbers down, but any figures that you see about the street count can only be representative of the whole. Proportionally the numbers may have come down, but I don't think they are as low as nineteen. Agencies, such as the Bus day centre, report seeing up to 75 clients in any one week. And 450 people have lived just in the ECHG (English Churches Housing Group) hostels, that's two hostels in Cambridge, over the past year.
Are there any laws to protect homeless people? Now I racked my brains for ages and, having done a Housing Law degree, I couldn't come up with many. The 1996 Housing Act has the biggest impact on homeless people. It's one of the best bits of law, I think, although it is very flexible in its interpretation. For instance, what one council will interpret as their duty to house a homeless person, another council might not interpret as their duty to house a homeless person. There have been a lot of case studies and court precedents, examples where fine points of the legislation have been argued out, but the basic focus of the act is to put a duty on councils to house people who are unintentionally homeless, vulnerable, and in priority need.
"Unintentional homelessness" is very broad and, when councils find themselves short of accommodation and short of funding, it's quite easy for them to argue that a lot of people have brought homelessness on themselves because of their own actions.
Vulnerability and priority need is normally taken to mean physical illness, mental illness, or having dependent children with you. That's why most families who find themselves homeless are housed, at least temporarily while they are assessed, if not given permanent housing. But it is also why single homeless people often end up rough sleeping, because they are not deemed to be in priority need, and they're not deemed to be vulnerable enough. Even though Louise Casey herself, the government's homelessness tsar, said that all homeless people in her eyes are vulnerable.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as you probably know, isn't really law, but it does define basic shelter to be a necessity and part of the human right.
Tenancy Law gives people the right to a court hearing preceding eviction. This includes everybody. It includes people who are squatting, if they have a Section 6 in the window to prove that they are living there and they intend to stay. It includes people who have been evicted so that the landlord is able to repair the property, or to sell the property. And it includes people who are in arrears. So that's quite useful.
Asylum seekers are giving food and shelter as a basic right but they are not given their freedom.
There are a lot of services in this city which are absolutely excellent and I'm really proud to be working with them. My favourite is the Bus day centre, run by Wintercomfort, which is an amazing place. They're looking at changing it a lot inside. They're looking at making people prove who they are in order to access the services. And they're looking at encouraging people to take up more of the support that they offer there. At the moment they have a rent deposit scheme, so that people who are homeless and ineligible for help from the Council under the 1996 Act can borrow money or have their rent guaranteed to help them into private sector housing. Unfortunately, that's coming to a close very soon, but we're hoping to campaign to have the Council get that up and running, rather than the Bus. There's also a medical clinic that runs from the Bus. And people can have cups of tea there, cheap meals, and play pool. So it's a good place for people just to socialise and make friends, which is essential if you're on your own.
The night shelter, Jimmy's Night Shelter, is a very informal place. People going there don't have to give their real name if they don't want to. If they stay one night their place is kept open for them until seven o'clock the next night, and if they're not there it's given to somebody else. So, it's very informal, but it provides a lot of support. There's a psychiatric nurse who visits there, and they have other homelessness projects going on in their basement, and they run a football team from there as well.
The main hostels that house people who've been homeless and rough sleeping in Cambridge include English Churches Housing Group, who have 250 beds and have housed about 450 people this year; and the YMCA, which is harder to evaluate as it doesn't just house homeless people, but it does give a lot of support, and accepts from our panel a lot of young men who find themselves homeless, and young women as well now. The Cyrenians are moving away from their status as a hostel as they're looking at longer-term housing and more support within the community, but they've traditionally been direct access. And there's Women's Aid, who are somewhere between a night shelter and a hostel, providing immediate help for women and longer-term support.
There are also communities around Cambridge. These include Emmaus, which is a completely self-sufficient little community at Landbeach, just north of here. They repair and make furniture and other items to sell to the public, which keeps them all in a house and in work.
There are some co-operatives as well: groups of people who have decided they don't want to be dependent on the private rented sector with its extortionate rents, or on the Council with its dependency culture. The co-ops include Argyle Street, and I think there's one called Rainbow Housing Co-op as well. Co-ops have become quite large now and enable groups of people to buy houses collectively, sort out their own housing solutions, sort out their own community, and set their own rents.
There are also of course the travelling communities, and the river community which I come from is very strong on the River Cam. And there are also more road travellers, and more people on both official and unofficial sites, in Cambridgeshire than in any other county. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Outreach work in Cambridge is mostly through the CATS team (Contact Assessment and Tenancy Support team), which is paid for by the Council and has workers in it from lots of different agencies. Their work is to go out and meet homeless people, inform them about the services that there are in the City, and support them in accessing accommodation and support.
There's Centre 33 which gives advice to young people; it also helps them through housing crises and will help people through the application process, so that they don't fall through the system when it's all new to them. There are also housing providers, which we bring together every month to look at difficult cases and make sure that young people are housed in the appropriate accommodation.
With employment and education there's a lot of support from Aspire and the Big Issue. Aspire is a catalogue company that's just set up here that employs homeless people, who can become self-employed within the organisation, get a minimum wage and get experience and qualifications to move into work in the wider world, with support to help them do that. There's the Big Issue which allows people to be completely independent and which I'm sure you all know about.
There's also a lovely lady called Marian who runs a little group called Missing Links. She visits all the different hostels and sees people who've recently been homeless to talk about employment and training issues. She helps them to access training so that they can get employment in the future, and supports them through that so that they can reintegrate properly into the community.
Medical services. There are psychiatric nurses who visit the hostels. There are detox facilities, but these are being shut down now, which will leave a lot of people out on a limb. There's also a surgery, as I said, which runs at the Bus. Unfortunately this is also going to have to close soon, which means that there will be no medical care for homeless people - no help with the sorts of things that we'd all see a GP about.
There's support for leisure activities for homeless people as well. Suzanne Gardiner, of the Sports and Health team at the Council, has been fantastic in getting leisure cards out for homeless people so that they can access the same low-cost facilities as everybody else in the City; normally you need an address to get that. Also the CATS team are looking at setting up a photography course for homeless people, and the Bus are hoping to increase their social activities and their evening activities.
There is free advice for homeless people from the CAB, as there is for everybody else, but they're particularly skilled in dealing with these issues. And research is being conducted by CHP, Cambridge Homeless Partnership, the organisation I work for.
And also Cambridge University - most of you will be pleased to know there's now quite a strong student group at the University. They are going to be working with us on research into the true current picture of homelessness and what's needed, and use the results as a basis for campaigning.
Councils are the biggest service providers for homelessness in this city and across the UK, because they must house all vulnerable homeless people who are in priority need, in particular homeless families. This is why you don't hear about these people in the media: because most of them are catered for. There's not always support for them in their tenancies - help to manage their tenancies and maintain them - but at least they have accommodation while they're being assessed. So that's brilliant really.
The Council in Cambridge are employing five new Tenancy Sustainment Team workers, which will enable people in council accommodation to get support with their rent and filling in forms and keeping their tenancies. And the Council fund the CATS team. But the CATS team itself might end in March, as they're looking to renew the funding.
The Council provides the majority of funding for the voluntary sector. On the one hand this is brilliant because it keeps the voluntary sector going, it means they have regular income, and they're able to plan an effective service for the homeless people that they work with. On the other hand it's difficult because political agendas change; as a result, the services that voluntary agencies are able to provide fluctuate according to what the Council say they can spend the money on.
The Council at the moment are producing a new strategy for homelessness, as all councils are being asked to do. The draft strategy has just come out; I was involved in some of the initial consultation. The problem it needs to solve is that the Government has asked every city to achieve a two-thirds reduction in numbers of rough sleepers. Cambridge was allocated funding for this about two years ago, but has not met the target, so the Council need to look at how to do that in order to continue to receive funding from central government.
The new strategy is going to be focused on supporting people to return home. In a way, you might call it repatriation. This is something I'd like you to think about because I need to feed back to the Council a little bit about what the public think about this, and about how their new policy might affect homeless people, and how it might be shaped to make sure that it is helping and not hindering homeless people.
What they're doing is to strengthen the local connection criterion, which is also part of the 1996 Housing Act, which says that unless you have a local connection you are not entitled to help from the local council. This will mean that if people come to Cambridge believing that they will be able to start a new life here, believing that it's a wealthy enough city that they will be able to find work here, and if they find themselves homeless, they will be put on a train back to where they came from.
There are certain exceptions to this, I believe: people suffering domestic violence and fleeing from that will not be sent home. Some people leaving the prisons and the Army won't be sent home but will be given extra support, or sent to where they want to go to. But the majority of people are going to be sent away when they come here for support in the future, because it's believed that Cambridge, because of its affluence, is attracting a lot of people who end up sleeping rough here. There's huge turnover - up to nine people a week, as I said earlier. The Council is just unable to cope with providing housing for all these people, and it's going to start sending them away to meet its two thirds reduction so that it can continue to support the people who do come from Cambridge.
The new strategy tries to ensure that the agencies work effectively together and that there are no gaps or overlaps in services. This is going to involved a lot more consultation and review. The Council say that they want to consult the public, and homeless people, as well as the agencies, which is a good step forward.
The new strategy will develop existing services, particularly looking at long-term solutions and a more holistic approach, recognising that all homeless people are whole people, and that all aspects of their lives need to be dealt with in order to ensure that they are able to cope on their own.
What are homeless people themselves doing about homelessness? Within the homeless community you have buskers, you have people who do performance and some who do street art. I met someone last month who turned up on my doorstep drawing a picture of my daughter, because he'd spent his life in prison learning how to paint and draw, and now he wanted to spend the rest of his life travelling around and earning his living by painting buildings and portraits. You get a lot of very creative people, especially in this city, who try and earn their living by providing some kind of entertainment for the public.
Homeless people are also looking at self-build projects in this city. There's an organisation called PuSH (Practical Solutions for Homelessness) just starting up, which is trying to find funding to let homeless people take building courses, and land for them to build their own houses that they can then rent cheaply from the Council or landowner and live in.
There are also a lot of people who build informal shelters. I don't know how many of you wander up to Stourbridge Common very often but there are very often benders, just tarpaulins, small structures, things like that, that people just build for themselves to provide some kind of shelter. That's a very small reflection of the global picture. In Italy, I believe, a third of all homes, a third of all houses and buildings, are actually not legal - they're on squatted land and therefore the government could decide to pull them down.
In many places like India, Karachi in Pakistan, there are communities who have clubbed together to buy land and buy simple materials for making shacks and shelters. There's a group called Mahila Milan in India, which is a women's group, who have clubbed together to start up credit unions and saving schemes so that they can afford to pay when their children are sick, and so that they can afford to install adequate sewage into their informal settlements. And, where governments are either too poor or unwilling to provide housing for the masses of people across the globe who are in very inadequate and poor housing conditions, these people are clubbing together in their communities and trying to do something for themselves about it.
Then there's travelling. A lot of homeless people, as I say, travel. There are many homeless people who are unable to access housing, but do manage to earn enough money to be able to buy themselves a car, or a van, or a caravan, or a boat, and start a life of travelling where they can gradually build that up and improve their own living conditions without needing help.
There's also squatting. It is very rare in this city, but in other places, particularly in London, especially North London, there's a huge amount of squatting. People find themselves and their families not helped by the Council, and unable to afford private rented accommodation, and they make use of empty buildings while they're not being used.
This one - what needs to be done? I was a bit stumped really! I was wondering whether you could give me some answers. I thought what we might do is to divide into groups of six or seven people and have five minutes of brainstorming what you think the main things that need to be done for homeless people actually are, globally, locally, or nationally.
Right - the ideas I've got back here are:
More media coverage about local successes.
Having more homeless people to work on homelessness projects, rather than making jobs for do-gooders!
Permanent facilities like detox with no time limit for funding.
Supporting self-help initiatives as a priority, particularly in co-ops.
Improving facilities to help those leaving the Army. This is quite important and is being looked into at the moment by different agencies.
Letting homeless people register at normal GP surgeries. I wrote, personally, to every single GP surgery in Cambridgeshire last year to ask how many of them would be willing to accept people with no fixed abode. Only one wrote back and said yes.
Training for homeless people in literacy, medicine and encouraging people to train each other. That happens in London, but here there's quite a high turnover of homeless people so it's very difficult to maintain that sort of thing.
Not having targets, driving goals by local workers measuring where homeless people are.
Handling homelessness funding nationally. This is happening soon with the new Homelessness Directorate, which will replace the Rough Sleepers' Unit later this year.
Not stopping benefits when people start working. I think that's a brilliant idea, just to give people the time to tide themselves over. Giving an incentive for people to do small amounts of work and using different ways of doing this. Encouraging self esteem.
Homeless people don't have a duty to be like everybody else. You can live that lifestyle if you like, so your right to work and your right to have a postal address shouldn't be taken away, likewise medical services. Heroin should be available on prescription.
I've just heard that the Government have said that they're going to allow a certain number of doctors across the UK to start giving heroin on prescription, which will be quite interesting and I look forward to see how it pans out.
Dysfunctional families are a main cause of homelessness. Can we deal with this at this level? We need more family therapy.
The 'get out of my town' mentality forces more mobility if people are moved out of the city centre involuntarily. Government policy forces this.
Social support for filling in forms and help with languages for refugees. There's something called Language Line that agencies can use which provides this, but it's at a cost.
Cambridge is good, but it needs to get other councils to do the same. Hopefully with the new Homelessness Directorate, if the local connection criteria are put into place, the Council will start to have clout to force other councils to take charge and provide accommodation for people that they're sending back.
Providing homeless people with addresses even if they don't live there, or a postal locker.
Asking homeless people themselves, and linking more between homeless poeple and housed communities.
Changing the use of council housing from permanent housing to turnaround. More temporary housing to get people on their feet.
Continuity of care, especially medical. Need the detox centre to continue.
Need to know the true picture of the figures because it seems to be skewed for the Government's benefit. It's partly that, it's also because it's very difficult to measure everywhere.
Inadequately housed people are not known to be an issue.
Dealing with causes of homelessness. Unemployment, different regional issues, releasing from the Army, mental health support, releasing from prison, and providing half-way houses to get people back into society.
Very briefly, I'll summarise with my last question: Why should we bother at all?
Society has a responsibility towards people, and we're all part of society. If we don't take action to improve the situation then we're guilty of perpetuating it. And if homelessness is symptomatic of the problems in society, then resolving homelessness is a necessary step towards resolving society's other problems. It's not just that one leads to the other; I believe all these problems are interconnected. Scapegoating obscures the real issues.
Homeless people have a lot to offer society. Without their inclusion we're losing out on their skills, their knowledge, and their experience. Homeless people are in a fantastic position because, being outside society, they have a unique perspective and can tell us things that we don't realise ourself about the way it's working, which can help us to put things right.
Engaging directly with homeless people makes a real difference to their lives. It really makes a difference to people if you say "Hello". Someone's communicated with them that day, and you might find you learn something from them as well.
Giving money to individuals, if you do happen to give change to beggars, in particular, or buskers, allows people to eat, because you can't always get food - the Bus isn't always open, the soup run only runs during the winter time. It also enables people to access shelter, and gives them the chance to save up to get a deposit or something. A lot of people say "They'll just spend it on drugs", but if they do, at least it means that they don't have to steal for it, and they can start looking for support.
Supporting charities, giving money or other support to charities, enables volunteers and service providers to meet the needs that are not covered by statutory duty. Where the funding is ring-fenced from the Council, the service providers have to provide services in a particular way. If money and support are given to the service providers, then needs that the service provider identify that aren't politically useful for the Government can still be met by those services, which is really important.
Also the Council have invited consultation on their strategy on all homelessness issues, which can make a real difference. If you express your opinion as a voter then you get to have your say and you get to make a difference, across the board as well as to individuals.