We'll never end homelessness if we don’t have a proper long-term strategy

Street homelessness has changed in all manner of ways since we started 33 years ago this coming September. Then, we were dealing with thousands of homeless people living on the streets of London, the place that we started: 6,000 reportedly sleeping in the centre of London. This was largely the result of government policy as industries closed down, young people were refused social security and the malaise of government policy expressed itself on the streets of a number of cities. But the principal hit was London where thousands struggled to beg, sell their bodies or thieve to get by.  

The waking up to this harsh reality by the Tory government of John Major, saw some reform. Gradually people were removed from the streets and some accommodation was found for them.  

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And then in 1997 Blair swept into office and more work was done as resources increased to end the preponderance of rough sleepers who were an expression of homelessness. That government turned the tide and reduced the number of rough sleepers in our cities. Soon the new century saw an almost clean city, clean of the problems of rough sleeping and begging. But things were not to stay that way: under the coalition government of 2010, fiscal tightness and an increase in displacement led to an increase of street dwellers. The financial crisis of 2008/9 knocked the bollocks out of whatever grand plans the government had for greening jobs and housing and all manner of progressive environmental thinking. I had talks with government about all the green jobs coming our way; but they didn’t arrive because government policy embraced AUSTERITY.  

What a killer that was, preparing us for the worst mismatch of reduced government spending and contraction. Meaning that much of our current crisis of housing and poverty is down to austerity’s destruction of the socially supported community we kind of had before. 

Ever vigilant to the vicissitudes of street life, the Big Issue embraced anyone who needed help making ends meet. Embraced the arrival of Romanians, let into the UK with Blair’s commitment to the EU’s expansion. Worked with people from other parts of Europe, as did most homeless projects. But under Blair we also saw an increasing reliance on the state to provide more and more. So when austerity became the new policy for a new government, much of what had been achieved was washed away.  

The streets have always been a barometer of the health of a nation. America is looking unhealthy again because of the enormous increase in homelessness in their major cities. And our cities have followed suit. The malaise has returned three decades after we were first formed.  

But as we all know now, behind and beyond in the hinterland of homelessness there are more than 130,000 children living in temporary accommodation. We know that local authorities are going broke because of the enormous statutory requirement they have to provide for those made newly homeless. And we know that a revolution in thinking around housing and homelessness needs to be inaugurated in order to change the upward increase in dispossession that homelessness creates.  

Dispossession: the loss of things that help you to be human. A lack of place, a lack of belonging. A lack of wellbeing; an increase in health breakdown, a move into the margins of depression and an inability to cope with life.  

This is a most depressing menu for our current climes. Yet still government, and perhaps the opposition in their planning, are not seeing the essential element in all of the problems we face, which is the problem of poverty. It seems they cannot see that a family unsupported in its early stages, with only an inheritance of poverty, will fan out later in life to produce a further generation of poverty. 

The street homelessness that we created ourselves to address has changed. We have asylum seekers mixed in with the indigenous collapsed, mixed in with many people with mental health issues. What was once a seemingly straightforward case of eradicating street homelessness has now extended to addressing the crisis of Africa and the Middle East, the crisis of climate control, the spread of war and economic collapse. The UK is now, like Europe, reflecting a world of dislocation.

Interestingly we are not seeing millions of Latin Americans coming across the Atlantic to seek some stability and prosperity; rather they are heading north towards the prosperity of North America. Europe and the United States have become magnets of hope for a troubled world. And how do we see the future developing if we don’t factor in these global dislocations?  

There are, it seems, very few people involved in trying to converge thinking so that you can see the big driver behind all of this – the driver of poverty. The mistaken belief lingers that we live in a world that we can still patch and mend. If we have a new government coming down the line intent on addressing the issue of homelessness and the inability of the many to get a secure home, then they need to come up with more than the raggle-taggle thinking of our current government.  

Poverty distorts all human relations. So where’s that Ministry of Poverty Prevention that can unite the fight to end poverty’s dominion over us? That’s the question of the moment. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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