I went to Andy Burnham's rough sleeping summit. The government has a task ahead but we live in hope

I’ve never been to a summit before, but that was what they called the meeting of perhaps a hundred people who Andy Burnham had corralled to help him deliver on his pledge to prioritise rough sleeping. And get everyone in for Christmas.

We met at Downing Street and the prime minister said his plan was not just a project or an initiative: ending rough sleeping would be a priority for the whole life of the government. And he would lead from the front. There was a need to emphasise that this was not just another initiative because over the years governments have shamelessly had their little pet initiatives on the side to cover their arse. If you’ve got a government initiative you can always claim to be doing something. It’s largely a con job committed at the expense of the
public and those in need.

Ninety-nine days before the summit, the new prime minister claimed rough sleeping to be his first priority on his first day in office. And now, with the promise of leading from the front, the ducks seem well placed in a row.

Andy Burnham spoke convincingly, assisted by Angela Rayner. I was then greatly surprised to find they had pulled in Lorna Tucker, filmmaker and director of Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son. She worked on the film with Big Issue, telling the audience how Big Issue saved her life when she was 14. As a runaway, she was befriended by a Big Issue vendor who saved her from the threats of street life in London’s Soho.

What a brilliant and refreshing voice to lead us into our summit of ideas and solutions. I’m always disappointed when I don’t get the chance to dazzle people with my rhetoric but I was truly compensated by seeing Lorna flying the ‘lived experience’ flag. 

It was my first summit but it was not my first time at No 10 Downing Street. And it wasn’t the first time the politically powerful have shouted their devotion to end rough sleeping. To pulverise it into a nothingness. I would, though, say it was the first time I had heard such devotion being placed front and centre of the prime
minister’s objectives.

When asked at a workshop whether I thought it possible to get everyone in for Christmas and keep them there in the New Year – indoors, that is – I raised the issue of those who have been so acclimatised to street living that they do not want to go in. The press may well then have a field day as they point out those who are not in out of choice. 

Read more:

• Andy Burnham: ‘I’m not naive. You can’t say there will be nobody sleeping rough after Christmas’
• Andy Burnham wants to end rough sleeping. These new statistics show the challenge he faces
• New prime minister Andy Burnham starts with vow to end rough sleeping. Here’s how he aims to do it

It will look like a rerun of Burnham’s initial success at reducing rough sleeping in Manchester only for it to rise again. The press like pointing out this disparity between ambition and delivery without taking into account that Manchester had become a magnet town, drawing more street-livers to it.

I probably have a different view to most people working around the crisis thrown up by rough sleeping. I believe that rough sleeping is an unacceptable human rights abuse. It is a shortener of life, often by about 20 years. It changes your mental health in a very short time, being on the streets. It does your brain in. 

We need to look upon rough sleeping as a mental health issue. And therefore people have to be removed for their own wellbeing and safety. Away from the dangers to their mental health.

Street living was illegal when I was a runaway decades ago. Therefore you didn’t see it. I think political and social leadership then allowed the streets to be a place to put the homeless. Especially after they emptied the mental institutions but didn’t provide the promised ‘care in the community’. They let people drift out of local authority care, or out of the armed forces, people were running away from family problems, being evicted etc. They allowed them to fill the streets so in a way governments and local authorities didn’t have to deal with the crises thrown up by rough sleeping.

Charities and churches jumped in, offended by the inhumanity of governments which did not respond to this change in society’s problems; did not respond to family breakup, domestic violence, care leavers and all the other reasons why people end up homeless.

The shortage of social housing versus the vast increase in home ownership, the commercialisation of renting with vast increases in rents, all contributed to the crisis of homelessness. 

Part of the socially dispossessed became entrenched as a sector of society. No one was working to prevent the crisis but only to patch things up.

We should not allow people to fall apart and die young on our streets. Our streets should not be for living, ever.

That means creating therapeutic communities to sort out the reasons why people have ended up on the streets. It means the defeat of poverty and the need to end the inheritance of poverty. It means addressing the prison population where a third come out with nowhere to go.

Will this government break through and reward us all with stress-free streets, free of broken people reduced to turning the street into a linear dormitory? It’s a vast task. A spaghetti of a job. Because it’s so tangled up with education, housing, socialisation, work and wages, physical wellbeing – and that dreadful pauperism that hangs over government budgets. We live in hope.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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