Boris Johnson has pledged to end rough sleeping in London, but funding and the supply of suitable housing is shrinking
Our homeless fellow citizens have long supplied the problematic pathos to the street dramas of big city life. The stock characters are only too uncomfortably familiar: the vagrant, the beggar, the bag lady, the drunk slumped in a doorway. George Orwell lived down and out with them, Ralph McTell sang about them and, from time to time, politicians have been embarrassed by them. When Spitting Image set images of rough sleepers to Walk On By, it crystallised a view of Thatcherism's dark side: Tory minister George Young had complained about having to step over the homeless when entering London's Royal Opera House.
London's Tory mayor Boris Johnson won't have forgotten that "nasty party" gaffe, and would not be human if his efforts to reduce the capital's rough sleeper presence were not encouraged by it ? or by the approach of the Olympics, which he hopes will showcase London as "the best big city in the world".
He's sticking firmly to an intriguingly unkeepable pledge to end all rough sleeping in London by the end of 2012 and has recently provided upbeat progress reports, saying that three-quarters of the 200 or so who are most "entrenched" no longer bed down under the stars and that his scheme to prevent new street sleepers spending more than one night in the capital without a bed has made a successful start.
But there's less reason for cheer beyond the top lines of the press release. London's homelessness charities, including those working in approving partnership with the mayor, all agree that the overall numbers of people spotted sleeping rough are going up. The best counting mechanism they have has shown a rise from just over 3,000 individuals annually to nearly 4,000 during the three years Johnson has been mayor, and none believe these stats tell the whole tale.
Thousands more take refuge in hostels, and who knows how many more are squatting or "sofa-surfing" through the living rooms of successive friends and acquaintances. A new report by Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, found that vast amounts of homeless are hidden. Another homelessness charity, St Mungo's, says it alone helps 10,000 people a year. Bob Baker of the Simon Community thinks all the figures "crazily inaccurate". He says the house they run in Kentish Town where, three days a week, the street homeless can wash, clean their clothes and eat receives 50 to 80 people, "many of whom no one else knows about".
The big cause of the homelessness increase is stupidly obvious: the economy. Despite London's high unemployment, people still flock here from across the UK and beyond, seeking fortunes and opportunities. Many of the Poles and other eastern Europeans who arrived during the boom have returned home but others are still coming, often unaware that the casual work surplus has gone, and ending up with nowhere to go from day one.
Then there are those with what are known in the trade as "complex needs": cocktails of physical, educational, psychological, relationship and drug dependency issues, of which homelessness can be both consequence and cause; fears and traumas to flee. St Mungo's says that only 4% of its clients are in work, compared with 86% in the mid-80s. Accommodation is just one of many things they need ? and their chances of receiving it are shrinking.
The funding of homelessness services across the country is falling, with London no exception. Centrepoint is planning redundancies, many boroughs are cutting back and the longer-term backdrop is a deepening housing crisis in which the supply of the types of homes that those who find their feet could afford seems set to atrophy. The mayor's scheme includes "providing support that will enable people to return closer to home, providing it is safe to do so". But why did they leave home in the first place? What if they come back again? Where will all the homeless people go?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/25/homelessness-boris-johnson-funding-shrinking
Sam Brownback Laura Bush George W. Bush George H. W. Bush Jimmy Carter
No comments:
Post a Comment