How one woman's arrest helped to scrap the Vagrancy Act and decriminalise rough sleeping

Like many 13-year-old girls, campaigner Kerri Douglas used to dream about being famous. By that age, she had already spent years moving between foster homes. “I used to bunk off school and go to the West End because you used to see famous people,” she told Big Issue. “Then I went and missed the train home and joined the homeless community under Charing Cross train station.”

Her reason for this was simple: she felt safer on the streets than in her foster placements.

“I already knew the homeless people around there and I just ended up staying there,” she said. “They were like a family to me, really. Most of them were kids in care, misunderstood because of their neurodivergences that nobody knew about back in the late 90s. For the first time, you fit in.”

Having experienced abuse and neglect from a young age, Douglas didn’t see sleeping rough as a sentence, but an escape.

“Back when I was a kid in the 80s, there was a programme called The Raggy Dolls, and it was basically about the reject toys that were broken,” she said. “I just think the homeless community is the same. We were the same, even though we were different.”

Today, Douglas is a campaigner who helped to overturn the Vagrancy Act, a law which criminalised rough sleeping and begging in England and Wales for more than 200 years. But during the decade that she lived on the streets, Kerri became a target of the law herself.

“I was sitting at Piccadilly in my sleeping pitch and reading a book, as I always did,” she said. “People used to pass me to buy me a hot chocolate or croissant from Caffè Nero across the street.

“I had finished drinking my hot chocolate and I was freezing, and an undercover policeman jumped out of his car, accused me of begging because I had a cup next to me, and arrested me for breaching the Vagrancy Act.”

For the crime of being homeless, Douglas was landed with a £1,000 fine. And as she had no fixed address, she was remanded and had to spend the weekend in Holloway Prison.

Homelessness charity Crisis has argued that the Vagrancy Act treated those sleeping rough as “second-class citizens”, but Kerri believes that the archaic act had an even more dehumanising effect.

“You’ve seen the film Titanic. You’ve got the different classes on the boat: you’ve got the rich, then the ones in standard accommodation, but then you’ve got the ones that are treated like rats. That’s how we get treated on the streets by the police, by some normal people walking past… we get degraded.”

As well as restricting people’s freedom, Douglas blames the ancient law for the stigmatising homelessness. “For 200 years, they have dehumanised us. It started a wildfire of destruction for homeless people that need support.”

After more than a decade of rough sleeping, she managed to get into recovery and off of the streets, thanks to her own determination and a series of “miracles”.

She said: “I went to the drug rehabilitation centre and said, ‘I’m ready to stop again’. They helped me with that. I turned up at an old hostel that I used to live in and they bent over backwards to get me in a room.”

She experienced a relapse after finding out she had contracted hepatitis and HIV. But after a few weeks, she recommitted to recovery.

Read more:

• Scrapping the Vagrancy Act won’t end the criminalisation of rough sleeping
• Rough sleeping to finally be decriminalised with scrapping of ‘cruel’ 200-year law
• When the Vagrancy Act is finally gone, its replacement must be driven by compassion

“I thought, no, I can’t do this. If I don’t get out of this, I’m not going to live until I’m 25. And then, eight months into my recovery, I fell pregnant with twins. They kind of cemented that recovery, because I had to do it for them now, you know?”

Nowadays, Kerri’s life looks very different. Her HIV is undetectable and she no longer has hepatitis. She lives in a flat with her children and discusses experiences as a keynote speaker and author. When she posted about the Vagrancy Act being repealed, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government commented to say that her story was the reason why.

“I was absolutely sobbing, because we won,” she said, reflecting on the moment she found out the Vagrancy Act was no more. “Power to the people, power to every single person on the street, and it felt amazing.

“Crisis, Single Homelessness Project, Saint Martins – all of those that campaigned. You only see a couple of charities being mentioned, but there were endless people campaigning. It’s revolutionary, we did it. If we changed this, what else can we change if we all unite?”

While there’s a lot of work still to be done, Kerri feels optimistic about the future.

“There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and we might have a new prime minister and stuff, she said. “I think it could be quite positive if he sticks to his word.

“Every single person that sleeps in a doorway, the most complex cases, have the same in them to be able to get to where I am or on their version of their dreams coming true. So it’s about encouraging them that they do deserve more, and that they can have more.”

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