From the seventh floor of
the multi-storey car-park at this late hour the view is rather magnificent, but
a cruel wind is whipping up the rubbish and there is not a soul around. I’m a Thames
Reach London Street Rescue team volunteer tonight searching for rough sleepers
with my colleague Rob and we have received a self-referral from a man sleeping
rough in the car-park. It’s been a frustrating night. In Hounslow we discovered
plenty of cardboard bedding but not the group of Lithuanians we feared could be
sleeping rough. Under Kew Bridge and in a park in Putney the lone rough
sleepers we have been tasked with contacting were not in their usual places. I ruminate
on the unsettling paradox of being grievously disappointed not to find someone
sleeping rough in sub-zero temperature.
But here on the stairwell we
find our man, a 21-year old Pole called Karol. His is a story which is virtually
a generic tale of youth homelessness. He came to this country as a fourteen
year old unable to speak a word of English. He found his feet at school after a
difficult start, but then his mother re-married and he couldn’t get on with his
step-father. Over time the tension between them intensified and culminated in a
thrown punch and a swift eviction from the family home. Karol has no intention
of returning and has been sleeping rough intermittently, with occasional
respite on a friend’s sofa. He sleeps close to the lift as from this position
he can hear it jerk into motion in the middle of the night, advertising the
approach of the car-park attendant on his rounds. Karol can then scurry out of
sight and return when he has passed by.
It doesn’t lead to a restful night’s sleep.
His deepest frustration lies
with the local council’s Housing Options service. As an able bodied young man
he has no statutory entitlement to housing, which he accepts with equanimity.
What he can’t comprehend is why the housing advisor should hand him a list of hostels
that offers some hope but, as he studiously rings each of the numbers provided and
finds that most are no longer in operation or connect him to projects for which
he is ineligible, turns out to be a distressing hoax, or so he perceives it. ‘This
list is just to fob me off’, he rages, throwing his hands up in dismay.
The No Second Night Out hub is
the only chance of somewhere out of the cold for Karol tonight and, late in the
evening, they inform us of a space. Walking into the building with my woolly
hat pulled down to my eye-brows I am impressed with how solicitous the member
of staff keeping pace with me is, indeed unnervingly so. Then I realise she
thinks that I am booking in and Karol is the volunteer. So we swop places. The
room is full of men sleeping on the floor in various states of dishevelment,
one of whom is emitting a monstrous, spluttering porcine snore that ricochets
around the space.
Taking in the very basic
provision, Karol pragmatically calculates that staying at the hub is a step
worth taking as it gives him the opportunity of exploring his options. It’s not
the kind of place where he would want to stay for more than two or three days,
but that is the point of the hub; no frills, no danger of settling in, but good
quality advice and assistance and an unambiguous offer of help, called a single
service offer.
We have one last call to
follow up, a self-referral from a man who wants to meet us outside the entrance
of a housing block. Once there, we ring him on his mobile phone and he limps
towards us out of the gloom. Malcolm is currently bedding down in the corridor by
the door of the flat where, for six years, he lived with his mother until she
died in 2011. He continued to stay there after her death but was evicted three
weeks ago. He embarks on a convoluted tale involving tenancy succession rights
and rent arrears. Bewildered and painfully unassertive, he seems utterly
helpless in the face of this humiliating catastrophe.
To date the council has been
unable to help him, but he has an appointment with it pending and we conclude
that with some advocacy support there is some chance that we can pull him out
of this steep downward trajectory that will otherwise culminate in him sleeping
rough on a cold pavement.
This is a story of two very
different men connected by the disquieting similarity in their experiences of seeking
help from local authorities. Both describe with bemusement journeys that
involve taking numbered tickets from machines, waiting in queues, finding it is
the wrong queue, being given lists of addresses with numbers that don’t exist,
hearing baffling, incomprehensible phrases - local connection, statutory
rights, eligibility, rights of succession, priority groups. A palpable Kafkaesque horror emerges in the
telling. And, if there is one lesson to
take away, it is that to stand a decent chance of getting a hearing and a
satisfactory outcome then a knowledgeable advocate is, if not essential, then a
huge advantage.
We also have experiences of
housing advisors providing advice which is accurate and comprehensible imparted
with politeness and compassion in circumstances where the options at their
disposal are often desperately limited. But the variableness of response is
simply not acceptable and if we are to hold back the encroaching tide of new rough
sleepers then timely, effective, preventative housing advice has to be delivered
with far greater consistency.
So at around 1.30am I get on
my bike and pedal home, reflecting on the fact that the two men we have seen
self-referred and wanted to be found and musing over how many more people there
are sleeping rough in blocks of flats, on stairwells, in derelict buildings and
in car-parks, hiding themselves away across the capital.
A shorter version of this blog was published in Inside Housing on March 1st 2013
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