The gov’t plan on tackling homelessness and rough sleeping has zero chance of working because it seeks to deal with the effects while every other one of its policies exacerbates the causes. No strategy has a chance of working until this is treated as a national issue. 1/THREAD
My own experience of homelessness and rough sleeping is not atypical. I’ve campaigned in this area for a decade and spoken to hundreds of people sleeping rough. The fundamental issue is that homelessness is treated as a “local” issue. The result is that local authorities 2/THREAD
see homeless people not as people in need, but as a drain on their siloed resources and a drag on their local statistics. Their first and primary instinct is to not allow you onto their books in the first place. They do this by asking people to prove “local connection”. 3/THREAD
This is much more difficult than it sounds. The vast majority of homeless people become nomadic before becoming homeless. Following jobs, staying with family, sofa surfing at friends’. The area in which you end up homeless is rarely the area in which you led a normal 4/THREAD
life, with a tenancy agreement, bills and on the electoral registry until a month before. Life just isn’t that fucking neat. Not to mention that the least likely thing to have with you as a rough sleeper is old bills and paperwork. Councils know this and prey on it. 5/THREAD
You are sent from pillar to post. One council says you can’t prove you live there, the other that you haven’t lived there long enough, the third that you haven’t lived there recently enough. The entire process is designed to discourage you from asking for help. 6/THREAD
Along the same lines, councils will also refuse to help you UNTIL you’ve become homeless. If you go to them knowing you will be evicted, they pretty much ask you to come back after you have been evicted, by which time you’re much more difficult and expensive to help. 7/THREAD
And so, allocating £100m to “end rough sleeping” while simultaneously taking £5.8bn out of local authorities’ budgets, is applying a band aid to a knife wound, while twisting the knife still in it. It may deal with the appearance, but it does nothing to stop the flow. 8/THREAD
And this is precisely what will happen, I fear. “Nobody likes to see rough sleepers”, the minister said today. This £100m will be used to make rough sleepers less visible; to move them along; to stack them in bunk beds; to make poverty more palatable to the rest of us. END/THREAD
