Since bursting onto our screens in the third series of Big Brother back in 2002, Alison Hammond has rarely been away from the spotlight. And that’s good news because she’s funny, whether interviewing big names and exploring big issues on the This Morning sofa or as a panellist on Rob Beckett’s Smart TV. For our brand-new regular feature, Big Questions, she covers everything from dreaming of being a singing nun to The Rock’s chunky arms.
And as for her big idea to save the world? “Get everyone to spend just one day a week doing something kind for someone else. Imagine if every person did that? The ripple effect would be mega.”
What else is in this week’s Big Issue?
Covid effectively ended rough sleeping with the Everyone In scheme. So where did it all go wrong?
Five years ago, as the Covid-19 pandemic put the UK into lockdown, rough sleeping ended. At least temporarily. The Everyone In scheme in England – and similar efforts in Scotland and Wales – saw thousands of rough sleepers housed in hotels, offering a golden opportunity to make street homelessness a thing of the past. It didn’t endure. England’s official rough sleeping snapshot showed last month that more than 4,600 people were counted on the streets in autumn 2024. How has the state of homelessness across the country been allowed to fall so far? Big Issue spoke to some of the people who worked tirelessly on Everyone In’s front line to find out what happened.
The Shadwell landlords have been prosecuted for their crimes. But where is the justice for the tenants whose lives were destroyed?
On 5 March 2023, a fire broke out in a flat in Shadwell, East London. What it revealed was grimly reflective of modern Britain: at least 17 men had been living in the tiny two-bedroom flat, rooms crammed with bunk beds, mould on the walls and bedbugs biting them. Tragedy came when a charging e-bike battery caught fire. The fire killed one resident and plunged the rest into homelessness. This month, almost two years to the day since the fire, the landlords of the flat were finally sentenced in court. Big Issue was there to find out what justice looks like for those who survived the fire.
Labour told to ‘listen to disabled people and think again’ after ‘biggest cuts to benefits on record’
Disabled people spent the last few months “terrified” that their benefits were going to be taken away as Labour ministers pledged to push people into work and off state support. The government then finally revealed its proposals for reform on 18 March, which include tightening the eligibility requirement for the personal independence payment (PIP), freezing the health element of universal credit for current claimants and reducing it for new claimants.
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