Friday 28 December 2018

The UK's Homelessness Epidemic


A couple of weekends ago I went out in London for some pre-Christmas drinks with some friends from university. It was a rainy evening, but the streets were full of people heading home from Christmas shopping or out to office parties and to catch up with friends. It was hectic. On my way to the pub I crossed from Euston train station to Warren Street underground, a walk of no more than five minutes down just one road. Dodging the mums dragging their bags of presents home and the groups of students laughing and joking as they headed further into town, I passed a total of eleven homeless people sat in doorways attempting to protect themselves from the spitting rain. I, along with everyone else, kept walking past.

Britain is in the middle of a homelessness epidemic. Homelessness charity Shelter estimates the number of those with no permanent residence at 320,000, an increase from 307,000 in 2017 and 294,000 in 2016. Of those 320,000 the charity Crisis estimates that over 24,000 will be sleeping rough, on the streets or public transport, over this Christmas period. According to the same study, the number of rough sleepers in Britain has risen by 98% since 2010, and the number in tents and buses has increased by 103%.

The dramatic rise in rough sleeping is having an impact at local level. In Brighton and Hove, which has the second largest homeless population in England, city councillors are finding themselves heavily divided on the best way to tackle the issue. After the council was asked to apologise for forcing several homeless people out of their tents early this year, the debate over how best to respond to the rising number of rough sleepers has intensified, with Conservative councillor Robert Nemeth claiming that now is the time for “tough love not warm words”. Allowing tents on the street and not doing more to tackle street drinking, he claims, is a “national embarrassment” that is harming both the affected individuals and Brighton’s tourism industry. Green councillor Alex Phillips countered that the city’s decision to spend £10 million on improving infrastructure would have been better spent on housing.

But here lies the problem. Local councils are having to make decisions based on their limited budgets, and in Brighton, which depends on tourism for a large part of its industry and income, it makes sense that better infrastructure will win out in the allocation of funding. Despite the national government’s asserted aims to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027, local councils across the country are arguing that they are not being provided with the funding required to tackle the issue effectively.  Local government is at the pointed end of a spear that has been systematically failing those at risk of falling into homelessness for years.

Individual causes of homelessness (the breakdown of relationships, drug and alcohol misuse, domestic violence – which was listed as a cause in a staggering 6,850 cases of homelessness in 2017/17) are exacerbating factors for large numbers of rough sleepers across the UK, but the rising number of individuals finding themselves without a place to stay in recent years points to underlying systematic factors increasingly making people vulnerable to losing their home. The most frequently reported cause of homelessness is failure to find new accommodation at the end of a short hold lease, followed by increasingly unaffordable rent prices. The housing crisis in the UK continues to worsen, with the average rent price in London now costing 49% of the average monthly salary, and the national average cost of a house standing at 7.8 times the average annual salary for a full-time worker. Home ownership is increasingly unattainable, and renting is increasingly unsustainable as the shortage of suitable property continues to drive up prices. Stagnating wages and the instability of renting also means that 8 million people in the UK are just one pay check away from being unable to pay for their home. The ever-increasing cost of living is reducing consumer spending as more and more money is diverted to private landlords and banks in order to pay for housing.

As living costs spiral upward, austerity measures have systematically broken down the safety nets for those at risk of slipping into poverty. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently accused the UK government of inflicting “great misery” on its citizens through its austerity policies. He cited a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that found that around “14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute”. Poverty on this scale, in the world’s fifth-largest economy, is a political choice, claimed the report. Such statements have seemingly passed under the radar thanks to the overwhelming focus on Brexit, which itself has purportedly cost the average UK household £900, according the Bank of England.

It is unfortunate that the political debacle of Brexit has diverted attention away from Conservative claims that “austerity is over”, because an examination of the limited implementation of these policies would have revealed far more about what we could be doing better to support the millions of people at risk of falling into poverty and homelessness. The Brexit monster has derailed Theresa May’s pledges to tackle society’s injustices, but it remains true that years of austerity-focused policies after the 2008 recession have left us a nation more divided and unequal than we were a decade ago, with more than one-fifth of the population living below the poverty line as wealth inequality continues to grow.

In his report on the UK’s austerity measures, Philip Alston claims that “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instil discipline where it is least useful...” (p3). As the use of food banks soars, the number deaths of homeless people increases by 24%, and the level of rough sleepers doubles in five years, the richest 1,000 Britons have increased their wealth by £274 billion since 2013. In 2018, the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in the UK is £724 billion which is greater than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion). These figures dwarf the £10 million that Brighton and Hove councillors put towards infrastructure for the city rather than housing for the homeless population. According to a government report from 2012, homelessness in the UK costs the taxpayer around £1 billion. A compassionate approach could solve this crisis. In fact, early interventions that prevent homelessness from occurring could also save the public purse up to £370 million.

The rising number of homeless people are just the most obvious sign of a system of austerity that has been damaging the middle and working classes in this country for years. When those people are imagined as drug addicts and failures, that demonstrates a society lacking in compassion. When tents and sleeping bags on the side of the street are “a national embarrassment”, we’ve lost our humanity somewhere along the way.

We need to push our government to do better by the people it is supposed to serve. And in the meantime, we could all do a little more to show compassion for those that society has failed. We can all try our best to not just walk past.

If you want to find out what you can do to support someone struggling with homelessness this winter, you can visit the Shelter or Crisis websites.