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.
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