The Homeless Problem - full documentary

i had um good job i had um four or five expensive cars you know at that time i was a rich kid yeah but it only takes two paychecks for you to it turned to the other side i would say took me about four months before i came home and then after i lost the house to kids and that was it but then um situation got it got a bit bad um ended up on the streets so i just basically started foraging and at the time going to what they called sit runs uh sandwiches and culture tonight uh at least it's something in your stomach and what those people do is really great [Music] thank you currently the national homeless charity called shelter they estimate that we're looking at approximately 320 000 people in the uk who are homeless but they acknowledge and everybody acknowledges that it's very difficult to get a true accurate figure of levels of homelessness in the uk so what we see across all four nations of the uk are that there are differences in the approach taken to measuring or estimating the number of people sleeping rough or experiencing homelessness so in england in 2018 the number of people estimated to be sleeping rough was two percent lower than in 2017 but still up 165 on the 2010 figure so big increase in scotland we see that amber has been relatively stable over about the past five years or so in wales there's been an increase in the number of people estimated to be sleeping rough and in northern ireland outside of belfast there's no national figure it's it's difficult now it has been difficult historically both because of the way in which local authorities gather data on their homelessness numbers but also because we've got these terms um of homelessness which are different according to the law so we have people who are statutorily homeless which means that they are accepted by local authorities as eligible they're in priority need they're eligible for full duty housing support we have people who are homeless but they're non-statutorily homeless which means that they're not necessarily prior to need or they don't they're they're not um eligible for full duty housing support so um i've worked in homeless services for seven years so i've come across lots of different scenarios where people have been classed as having made themselves intentionally homeless which i don't think any reasonable person would class as intentionally homeless they were talking people who have been served an eviction notice you know you'd assume that if you get served an eviction notice you've not been you know made intentionally homeless but if it's been through antisocial behavior or through running up rent arrears or things like that and then when you get the eviction notice you leave the property um rather than you know refusing to leave you can actually be classed as intentionally homeless through that one of the worst cases of it is when women or all men it happens to men too but um the cases i've come across have been women um have been at quite significant risk from uh from a partner or ex-partner and they've chosen to leave their property in order to remain safe or to keep their children safe and they have been classed as intentionally homeless but those are just the homeless people that present to local authorities as in need of housing we have a vast number of homeless people that we call hidden homeless who don't present at all to local authorities who don't approach their local authorities um as being in need of housing and so this category of hidden homeless covers a vast number of people we don't currently have figures for the numbers of hidden homeless people but one charity the homeless charity for single persons called crisis estimates that we're looking at approximately three million concealed households and concealed households might be um houses where people are overcrowded people want to leave because of the levels of overcrowding people live in an absolute poor quality dire accommodation and we also have under the hidden homeless category people who are sofa surfing who are moving from house to house living with their mates living with their family yeah i stayed from place to place you know some sometimes you won't have a bar for a shower or shave or anything like that for weeks on end and one of your mates will walk past you and catch you and say right you know come back to mind they feed you that you stay the night and then it could be a couple of weeks and you'll stay somewhere else head and homeless acknowledges are incorporates rough sleepers as well who aren't always visible we always think that rough sleepers are visible to us on the streets but they're not always a number of rough sleepers don't like to be visible being on the streets is highly dangerous a number of rough sleepers are victims of crime and so you'll find that a lot of rough sleepers hide away from visible parts of the street as i said i don't do what a lot of other homeless people do is you know get the head down on the street in the city i mean for for one too dangerous i mean it's not the first time that even the milton keynes people have been picked on and beaten up just for being homeless just for uh just to be in there or being insulted uh verbally abused so that's that's the side of that concern um even when uh when it comes to getting my head down at night i uh i had my uh i've still got my tent um in a wood in a small wood uh well camouflaged and all the time that i was there all lasted most of last year uh it'd only be the only video dog that come through having to sniff around and wander off again nobody bothered me um so you're saying um so this is the first time someone's been in here yeah yeah yeah and i've had a good poke around a good dig yeah i'm gonna have to get those um yeah those sleeping bags have got uh [Music] yeah they're gonna need a good wash yeah it's getting that yeah it's been getting damp in here this year as people we're very much into our roles and our routines and our habits um so our roles that are usually valued are ones around being a worker about it being a spouse a family member that the habits that you might have your daily routines um are usually quite sort of set and support your health and well-being because you can draw quite a lot of esteem from um the different roles that you have um the habits that you that you that are part of your daily routine so getting up going to work having lunch with colleagues coming home after work relaxing with family and friends those things are stripped away from you when you're homeless going to work i used to do warehouse security um which is really really fun you know you go to work you come back you put the kids to bed reading books you know just have barbecues in the back garden you enjoy going to work because you know when you come back it's providing for the family for the future present however you want to look at it so yeah i mean i had a normal not a very good life compared to some people and the roles that you you once had um are not recognized you were you were seen as someone quite differently um than you were when you weren't homeless or that look you know it's that look that nobody understands until you actually get it when somebody walks back and they look at you like uh you they've just scraped you off the bottom of the shoe that's really what it's like it's really what it's like it's just it's disdainful it's contemptuous it's as if you don't you you don't have the right you don't have the right to be in front of them you know it's just the attitude uh the manner that you get from certain types of people and then when when people used to um look down and they used to um sort of um you're one of them you're no good in society and then they spat in your face and niches stuff and everything else but then you do get the nice people that do help the people in themselves situations and they understand your situation and they do talk to you sit down with you have a chat you know take a bit of their time and that's nice because not many people do that these days because of how they look at us your routines are also quite challenging because a lot of the time there's been just thinking about um you know your next meal um how you're gonna find some accommodation um and so much time and energy is taken up with just the the bare essentials of survival keep keeping warm being fed um trying to get out the rain and the wind because you don't have anywhere to go so when you're freezing cold and you're wet it gets even worse and that can damage your your self-esteem and your confidence quite a bit if you let it i've i've done and i've been i'm when i was out there i felt suicidal quite a few times i thought where there's nobody out here to help me but why why i didn't do it i just i just think about my um kids i think what the kids can do with i'm about their dads so of course i am i didn't do it but there's a few times when i i wanted to know but i mean those people don't know you so you know who they judge you know the same thing could could happen to them yeah and maybe it should just to let them see let them know what it's like to be on the other end of it what people will look at is the moment of the person on the street without a home without thinking that perhaps the problem went much further back before then everybody on the street as we know has the problems um different people have different problems someone's emotional some is psychological but the majority that you meet i tend to be either alcohol or drugs when i started having my breakdown in cactin i started using crack cocaine i went on heroin at the time when i moved to hemel i tried to because i moved from captain to hemel to try and you know clean myself and get back on track i thought if i get away from everything that was happening from the baby mothers and so forth that i'd be able to sort myself out but then my granddad died about a week after i moved to hemel so i deteriorated even worse and i think for me that that was the last nail for me that got hammered and i hit the the lowest i could ever ever go and that's when i started hitting onto heroin as well i mean one of the other challenges of course in terms of mental health is that it's the sort of is it cause and effect in terms of homelessness of course people that are homeless are much more likely to have mental health issues and addiction issues but the homelessness is not helping rough sleeping particularly is traumatic it can actually cause ptsd it can cause depression it can cause anxiety it's you know it's brutal on the streets you know people get attacked people even get urinated on people get treated as less than human um you know it's a very very traumatic thing and it's traumatic not knowing where your next meal is coming from or where you're going to sleep that night so even just even if you didn't have any mental health problems going on to the streets actually you know coming off the streets it's likely that you're going to need some mental health support but there's also the fact that a significant amount of people do lose their properties because of mental health problems meaning that they struggle to maintain a tenancy in the first place so it's kind of yeah it's a real tricky situation all round then also it's tricky to work with so it's tricky to get someone referred into mental health teams if they are currently substance misusing um so it's it's difficult for the mental health teams to know what what symptoms come from the drug use and what symptoms come from the actual mental health issues so quite often they'll say well you need to deal with your addiction issues first before we can work with you there's also the fact that you know if you don't have an address where's your appointment there going to get sent to so there's so so many barriers to actually help you know getting help for your mental health while you're currently on the streets meanwhile your mental health might be getting worse and worse because you're on the streets so it's really difficult and one of the biggest challenges is that say for example to get the accommodation someone will have to not be using alcohol and drugs but it's really difficult to to go completely clean when you're living on the streets because it's such a challenging horrible environment to be in that's often one of the ways in which people manage so it becomes this vicious cycle and you can't get the support until you stop using but you can't stop using because it's the only way that you're managing in the environment that you're in so we know that you can't just generate this down and look to blame the individuals and say that person is somehow a problem because they're living on the street we know that we don't have appropriate income and welfare support for people so they can get their own kind of housing we know that many of the issues which directly face us on the streets in terms of people living roof we know that they're not just about individual problems or private troubles we know that they're also public issues they also reflect the policies of government the policies of austerity the impacts of austerity have had quite drastic effects on homelessness since 2010 when austerity policies were rolled out we've seen a number of welfare reforms such as the benefit caps the bedroom tax the localism act which affected housing policies essentially if we think about austerity more widely and its impact on homelessness services what we see is that between 2010 and 2017 which is the latest year for which figures are available at the moment there's a 23 reduction in the number of accommodation services available to people experiencing homelessness and a 21 loss in the number of bed spaces it's a long time ago it's about 20 years since i was working in soho and community mental health and we had clients who were homeless and it was really challenging because they were in hospital a lot of the time because there was nowhere else for them to go they didn't need to be in an impatient mental health unit they did initially when they were first referred first admit it but then there was there was nowhere and so it also creates all sorts of challenges because no one wants to be in an impatient draft unit longer than they have to be um and but there was nowhere else for them to be referred to and this is a common issue that you know they're going to be there's going to be a shortage of accommodation in the community and we need to invest sufficiently to to make sure that there are the supports available when they're needed i went to the council and i said to them i said look i've got a job i need to find a place to stay can you help me with that they're like you have to find it yourself we'll pay your first month's rent and deposit but then there's so many landlords in monkeys i don't accept dss even though it was only for the first month i had one work contract and everything up to 40 of landlords it's estimated won't accept either housing benefit or universal credit and so that means that the properties available to people in receipt of one of these benefits reduces drastically so people often forced to choose between accommodation that might not be suitable or might be of poorer quality than other people might have access to because the market available is so reduced we've seen a number of welfare reforms like those that made it very difficult for people to maintain their housing and it made it very difficult for people to afford their rent so if we take universal credit there are different aspects of this that have probably impacted on homelessness so one might be that there's a six week wait for payment when you're entitled to universal credit and although you can ask for an advance on that payment you will still have to pay that back so there's a six week period where even if you're in receipt of money over the long term that will be deducted from the amount of benefit that you get and that's a big change from job seekers allow and when when your home is trying to get well welfare benefits she can't get it because she needs an address to um send your benefits and you need a bank account and everything else a number of vulnerable and low-income families do live in the private rented sector and the private renting sector is uncontrolled it's deregulated so that means that a landlord can charge 60 pound per week for rent or a thousand pound per week for rent and there's no control on rents in the private rented sector and the landlords do kind of know that actually people are fearful of losing their home uh there's certainly some issues with people not wanting to rock the boat with their landlords because they worry that people you know that they're going to be made homeless even though you know there's technically laws in place to prevent that it can it can be got around in other ways we can also see the impact of the local housing allowance which is now a part of either new housing benefit claims or universal credit claims and in this case local housing allowances worked out on the average local rents but people are only entitled to the 30th percentile of the average rent of the area so what that means is that 70 of private rents in that area will be higher than what that person is entitled to and only 30 of those rents will be lower so that means that in lots of cases people won't be able to afford accommodation that might be suitable for them or they might have to top it up out of their benefit a number of housing policies that come into effect during the 1980s and this was around the time actually we started to see homelessness not as an individual problem per se but as a problem related directly related to housing and poverty one really important housing policy that came into effect in the 1980s was the housing act which introduced the right to buy act and the right to buy act allowed tenants to buy their own home with a 75 percent discount of the market rate so it allowed people essentially to buy their council home that they were currently occupying at a very affordable rate it is essentially 25 of the full cost and so what we saw happen uh there is we saw approximately two million um house house council houses sold off under the right to buy and those houses weren't replaced that money as well that was raised in revenue through selling off council stock didn't go back to didn't go back to the local authorities to to invest in the communities it went straight to central government um so we didn't see a reinvestment um through the sell-off of those council homes and essentially we ended up with what's called them a residual stock and the homes that weren't sold off were the poor quality homes and so we saw a polarization of homeownership and a renting of poor council housing stock and that occurred basically in the early 1980s another aspect of welfare reform is that when people are in private sector rentals rather than the payment of their housing benefit or the housing element of their universal credit going direct to their landlord as would have been the case previously they might be asked to manage that payment themselves so they'll be paid it and they'll be asked to then pay it to their landlords and that can cause complications for people if someone has been housed and they get a direct payment rather than it go into a landlord there are people who have real concerns about that and i think that to do a kind of one-size-fits-all thing you know if someone's an addict and they're saying to you i actually i'm not going to be able to manage this money if you hand it all to me i think actually that's you know that's really good forward planning from them traditionally the social housing um sector has always been the more affordable genuinely affordable um form of housing but since the localism act came into effect in 2011 uh the government reduced subsidies subsidy funding to social housing associations and it reduced its funding from approximately 8 billion to 4 billion to social housing organizations and in order to compensate for that loss social housing organizations were allowed to introduce what's called affordable rents and affordable rents are more expensive than social rents social rents tend to be 50 of the market rate whereas affordable rents are at 80 percent of the market rate so what's happened since 2011 in social housing forms of accommodation we've seen a rise in rents there too and we've seen a rise in the private rented sector too so um since the welfare reforms committee effect we've seen rents and private rent sector and social housing increase as the rents are increasing in the housing sector with the introduction of benefit caps um people haven't been able to cover the full rents or the full rental costs so what's happened is is that since 2011 and certainly since 2013 people have um have been forced to make up the shortfall in rent because with benefit caps it now only covers so much of people's full weekly income which includes housing rental costs and so we've seen a massive fallout of that we've seen a rise in numbers of homelessness because of those policies and a deregulated housing market we've seen at the peak we've seen um soaring rates of eviction we've seen unprecedented levels of eviction occurring in the rented sector both social housing and private rented sector at the peak we've seen about 115 evictions take place per day and as a result those people who are being evicted they have to present to the local authority as you know for homeless status for a home as a homeless applicant in order to qualify for emergency housing also what happened under the localism act is that homeless families would normally be housed in social housing and social rented housing because it was a form of cheap and a form of quality housing so it was a way so it was a source of housing for vulnerable homeless families but since 2011 and for the first time in the history of our welfare state local authorities are able to discharge discharge their duty and offload homeless families into the private rented sector to house them in the private rented sector and that's also creating problems for homeless families as i've said the rents and the private renting sector are extremely high it's extremely precarious there's no security of tenure there so what's happened since the role of austerity policies is we've seen very vulnerable homeless families being housed in very volatile and expensive housing market and even those families that are in traditionally traditionally cheaper rented housing they're finding it very difficult to pay for rents in in in social housing and when we're talking about home we're talking about that place where you can relax that place where you can be yourself that place where you can grow that place where you can be who you are and you know that you have the appropriate support attachments and engagements around you when you're starting to talk about issues to do with people on the streets those things are not present homelessness is more than simply being without a roof it's about a set of of emotional and relational connections with other people have a strong feeling of sense of home and those people who are rough sleepers have actually often had that deprived and that deprivation of a sense of place and a sense of harm in the first instance might have led to mental health problems or substance use problems or difficulties at school or difficulty with other kinds of relationships and i think for people that are homeless we haven't seen the beds the accommodation that's needed we haven't seen the specialist support in terms of drugs and alcohol support and in terms of vocational rehabilitation to support people from the street and to secure housing and back into employment there does need to be significant support for someone who has been housed it can't just be about placing someone into a property it has to be well actually what support holistic support does that person need you know do they need a drug and alcohol support worker do they need a mental health worker do they just need a generic support worker who's going to help them get all their bills set up and give them lifts to gp appointments initially and things like that in terms of service provision it needs to be integrated so the services that are provided by the national health service need to be integrated and supported by social services so it's it's done in a coordinated way where the people are getting homeless people are getting the accommodation that they need the beds that they need but they're also getting the mental health support that they're going to need as well because often there are sort of complex health and well-being needs that that need supporting and it's not as straightforward as just saying here's a bed or a straightforward as saying is some some counselling perhaps a medication it needs to be a combination of a range of different um supports and and and factors hospitals once some they know you're home say sort of um get treatment and and then they just chuck out of hospital they just and they're just saying um you're no good basically because so it still happens out of the hospital so just some give you um your treatment and then they just get and just get rid of this happens a few times some reached to a few um homeless guys they just i'm born in hospital then and then they just kicked kicked him out because you're not really going to get the services that they are already stretched and so it's about providing more for the people that that need it and also i think there's there's real wisdom and people that have been homeless supporting those that are homeless because they can really relate to that experience i mean i think that sort of um that their experience being on the streets means that they are then uh well positioned as mentors and supports for people so why do you help support homeless people now because i've um i've i've been there myself and i know what they're um what they're going through at the and when that and when they're on the streets because um a lot of people just um look down on them and now i'm trying to change their um i'm trying to get them motivated like um i did when i was out there sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't as i said i've already helped a few people um and they've one one of them has actually got off the drugs themselves um and actually got housed and that was someone in milton keynes where i'm currently at so that's it's a red experience so i'm looking forward to helping people out more in the future there was a homeless guy when i used to go to um like i used to go to meetings in london um patrick allen he passed away i used to see him every time i come off the station and stuff like that and when he passed away he wanted me to do something and then i got some support to set this up in milton keynes from an international humanitarian organization carlson international so they supported me and the sikh temple and milton keynes supported me and then it was up to me afterwards just to bring people on board like restaurants and things like that i set up a couple of uh soup kitchens in our screen and um then i also do um i work in south do nice shelter northampton bedford and all around surrounding areas some people might watching this might find it difficult to relate to homelessness because i think well i've got my friends i've got my family that would support me so i know that i have that sort of safety net but that's an assumption we make not everyone has there um and you know an example might be for lgbt young people where um they come out to their family and their family rejects them and they cast them out they literally say we don't know you and they might start sofa surfing with with some friends but their friends can only do that for a limited period of time they're too old then to be getting support from social services because um they're not seen as a minor anymore they're they're older team um and they're finding it difficult to get a job and they've they you know can't complete school and you can see that they become really quite vulnerable um and there might be some nights when they're sleeping rough because they can't get an accommodation um staying on a friend's sofa and then there are more and more nights when they're staying on the street and less and less nights when they're staying with friends what do you think when you when you see them um my first surgery honestly i'm thinking poor bastard uh you know i how why what's the situation [Music] i think everybody should do it for a fortnight everybody should be made to do it for a fortnight be homeless for a fortnight you can't be a politician until you've been homeless you know people make promises before they come into power and if you're gonna make a promise keep to it when you do come into power but that's what it is i mean a place like milton keynes shouldn't have that level of homelessness the way it is now it should be you know everyone there's so many empty buildings out there you can house people so there's definitely issues with the housing market and i think it's quite important to know that in the uk there's over 600 000 empty homes and there's just over 300 000 homeless people so there's actually enough empty homes in in the uk to give every homeless person to homes every time i tried every door that i went to just got shut in my face whether it was council whether it was probation uh whether it was a homeless team or a shelter every door every avenue got closed no you're too old no there's no support for you you've got no connections to here family members let's just say um so when you're trying and people say to you why don't you try and get off the street you know there's so many options for you no there's not when people are rough sleeping in particular there's you know there's not always many resources available to them and so uh so there is you know theft is not uncommon uh which obviously is a criminal activity um but we also kind of have things like the fact that many people even if they didn't have a substance misuse issue when they went onto the streets will frequently end up with one whether that's because you know everyone around them is doing it and it's like you know what it's it's rough on the streets i might as well or whether that's because and this does happen um drug dealers will target homeless people because they know they're quite vulnerable they know they're in a bad way they know that if they get them hooked onto stuff they'll actually be you know a very good regular customer so in the uk it's not illegal to be homeless in the uk but currently there are civil laws and criminal laws which make the behaviors and activities of homeless people in the uk illegal in him williams did let's just say i had this one particular police officer who who knew me and he was such a nice bloke but yeah he had a job to do and i understand that and i appreciate that but then there's some other police officers that just really wasn't nice even if they know you they don't know you you know they're so hard and used like i got back problems so i never used to give the police any trouble anyway but they're always on your case even if you're just walking through and you've done absolutely nothing wrong you just come out the court so you've done you've done no stealing no nothing you know no drugs nothing like that at all they still pull you over and by criminalizing the activities of homeless people in the uk makes it very difficult for homeless people to exist without committing a crime you know if if you get if you get caught begging you get cautioned penalized for whatever you want to call it but you only get so many chances like two i think um so i've learned a few people to be kicked out of the center and go to prison just just for that alone um the amount of people that shoplift is unbelievable it's a lot more than what you think um so most of them end up going to prison so for example it's illegal to be drinking in public in certain parts of city areas it's illegal to be found begging to be receiving asking for money um if you didn't have beggars people wouldn't be able to show humanity um so in a way they provide the service you know it's not that i've got anything against begging it's just that i can't do it myself i just can't do it you're not going to have um a sufficient um uh income often is which is the the case you're not going to have sufficient material resources you're not going to have all the the very many things that we need just to kind of get through from a day to day i mean i've been hungry and i've walked into um i've walked into stores and i'm talking about well before the uh what do you call it they all the security that they have these days and i just couldn't do it i just couldn't i had a chin of harm in front of me a big tina had one of those big oval ones bumped in the hand in front of me and i just couldn't do it i think because a few times that i did steal when i was a kid pet stuff uh i just felt so bad about it and nine times out of ten always got caught anyway [Laughter] so that in itself as a context is likely to generate certain forms of criminal activity which are going to be just about how do you get through to get enough to eat how do you get enough to stay warm how do you get enough to actually have sufficient life resources just to actually survive if we think about the criminalization of homelessness what we see is that as well as historical legislation like the vagrancy act that's used we also see the introduction of things like public spaces protection orders or pspos as they're often called although government guidance from 2017 says that ps pose shouldn't criminalize rough sleeping and homelessness the freedom of information requests that the manifesto club put in in 2019 found that three local authorities are still issuing pspos in relation to activities relating to rough sleeping and that about 20 or so are still using these to criminalize things like begging or loitering in public spaces and we are seeing increasingly local authorities relying on the police and um we're seeing increase in police monitoring of homeless people living on the streets in order to clamp down on vacancy related offences and so we've seen about 70 increase in vacancy related offences uh since 2006 to current times we've seen a 70 increase there so as we're seeing a rise in numbers of homelessness we're also seeing a rise in the numbers of civil orders and criminal laws that are used against the homeless as well a second dimension which is is very very important particularly in the context of rough sleepers is of course the visibility and the very public nature of the actual homelessness itself and therefore often the very public nature of the criminal activity which is much more likely to be pleased and much more likely to be identified and therefore dealt with by the criminal process more broadly so you have in the first instance where many people will often break the law they may break the law in a private space they may break the law in their homes they may break the law in spaces which are not being observed so readily and under such surveillance by wider society but somebody on the street somebody who is very very visible to public surveillance and very very visible to the um the policing and then the criminal process the kind of behaviors that they will undertake is likely or much more likely to fall under the remit of the criminal law so it's no surprise that when we look at our prison system we see an over-representation of homeless people within the prison system we're looking at anything between 15 to 25 of prison population made up of homeless persons and it's very difficult to give an accurate account because of the way in which the data is gathered but on average that's the number of homeless people at the percentage of homeless people within prisons so we have this very clear relationship where of the 86 or so thousands people in prison right now you know more than 10 000 of those people are homeless and when you're on your own on the street and you're walking down to where you think you're this person is going to be that you know also they're not there their stuff's there but they're not there it makes you wonder what's happened and next thing you know you've heard oh they've been arrested you know later on that day you could hear another two three people that you know they've been arrested you look at data that was released actually just again in august 2019 and you look at the issues around women in prison and one of the things that you find is that certainly in the last juror or saw whilst we had about 9 000 women who were actually imprisoned or sent to prison during that time frame it's um detailed by the government that somewhere in the region of 3000 of those people 3 000 those women were deemed to be homeless so that's an enormous kind of connection between homelessness for women and and imprisonment prison is a type of environment that that can exacerbate conditions of homelessness if you are housed before you go to prison it's unlikely you're going to be able to maintain that housing when you're in prison and or because you might not be able to pay the rent for example keep up with mortgage payments when you're in prison and your relationship might break down if you're living with your partner while you're in prison and um and so for those people who are housed anyway and are in prison um it's unlikely they're housed when they come out of prison but a number of people who go into the prison system go into the prison system as homeless and it's extremely difficult for those individuals to find housing at the point in which they come out of prison you go to prison if you're a worker or even if you're homeless it doesn't really matter once you go to prison if you're renting a property and you're doing so many weeks or months you lose your home flat out you lose your home i've seen so many men coming to prison you know got their kids so they've lost their kids this happened the other but when they're being released they're being released back out onto the street now they do say that they have a system in place in prison where they have to have to house you they don't have to house you and they don't have it's very rare that you'll find someone from in prison that's been housed you know when i last came out of prison before us wake myself up uh i was yet again on the street for two weeks so i had no tent no cooking facilities no nothing uh all the shops were closed so i had no way nowhere to go no one to turn to councillors with job centers was shot so what what do you do what we know is that about one quarter of prisoners who released end up being homeless so somewhere in the region of 25 of of of people released from prison have no where to go um which just indicates kind of that prisons are never going to be a particularly good way of actually dealing with the homelessness problem because then people are actually going back and facing homelessness post release but more than that it's also not a very effective way of dealing with their illegalities there was data released in august 2019 which indicated that two-thirds of homeless ex-prisoners reoffended um and it's just a vicious circle once once you're back out on the street they won't house you so what you do you go back out and you become a politific offender you know you continue the cycles and you go back into prison you know i've put myself in prison a few times on purpose to try and get housed try and get off the street because that's what i was told to do what criminologists do is they say well look at the backgrounds of these people look at homeless people look at people with mental health problems look at people with substance use issues look at people who've been excluded from school and so on and so forth and then look at the people that are in prison and of course that is the group of people they are the people that we actually we incarcerate those people who often have had very difficult life experiences and yes they have done something wrong and yes they will have breached the law and they will have been engaging in some form of criminal activity but almost the middle section the issue around the crime becomes relatively insignificant lots of people will break the law but only a certain kind of person is actually largely dealt with by the prison system and by the criminal process it's not so much about the nature or the extent of the illegalities that person has perpetrated but more that the prison becomes almost a vessel to house people who are on the streets to assume that we're solving the homelessness problem by placing people who are rough sleepers into prisons i think is is to miss the problems of incarceration so whilst it's very obvious to us when somebody is sleeping rough on the streets that they don't have a home that they don't have a sense of place that they don't have that appropriate mechanism for supporting identity formation or for providing the the basic nutrients that we need to grow as human beings whilst that's relatively obvious to us and visible to us in terms of of rough sleepers what's forgotten is that prisons are also institutions which do not have the basic features of a home they are not places which allow people to grow you're in your cell most of the time there's a lot of drugs a lot of violence a lot of debt a lot of issues depression anger different types of people that are in the prison as well doesn't help with with whoever's in that prison say for example you've got a murderer or a rapist that's in there and you've got someone like myself that's just a petty theft you know and they'll put someone like me in with a murderer you know or someone with anxiety or healthy mental health issues you know and that will cause a route a punch up and everything else in the cell um and you get punished for that you know i've seen people get into debt in prison uh for a pound for one pound and it was over a bag of haribo sweets and this blows this bloke actually got stabbed for it prisons are also institutions which are grounded in loneliness they're grounded in estrangement from close relationships they're grounded in a sense of isolation there are places where there is very limited private space if any private space at all just like we're on the streets you can almost just look at the two together and identify some of the continuities between what the experience of homelessness is and what the experience of prison is because both of them share certain lived effective or emotional aspects which are all about the deprivation of home they're about the deprivation of love and hence you can almost look at putting someone from this the street into a prison that it's not going to address the problems that have been on the street it's not going to address the homelessness and the emotional aspects of homelessness and when you put someone into prison you're placing them in exactly same kind of emotional constellation following work by the bureau of investigative journalism in 2018 what we also see is that the office for national statistics now also provides estimates of the number of people who have died whilst experiencing homelessness and the most recent statistics suggest that this number was about 500 and 96 hundred somewhere around there and that that was a 24 increase on the 2013 figure which is the earliest year that we have data for so this also suggests that people will say experiencing homelessness they're increasingly more likely to suffer ill health or or in the worst cases death i've been to a lot of funerals unfortunately and it's it's awful especially when you know the circumstances of their death are so preventable i think that's the worst part of it is that actually if um you know if they'd been given more support by the system in general you know i don't think it's any individuals person i think there's a lot of very good people working within the system i'm very privileged to have worked with worked alongside lots of professionals who really really care and really want to make a difference but the system is not the easiest thing to work within and there's only a certain amount of resources that we're given and so with those it feels like some people have slipped through the net sometimes and you know unfortunately sometimes they don't even have family around them you know some i know there's been funerals that i've gone to where it's been mostly the support workers of that person who have been there in thinking about the causes of death of people experiencing homelessness different causes have been suggested so the office for national statistics suggests that the three main causes are related to drug poisoning alcohol related issues and suicide it's horrific and it's heartbreaking because as i said it is preventable there is no need for someone to die in the cold on the street by themselves a study by university college london has actually suggested that up to a third of those deaths to do with preventable illness and diseases so things such as cancer things such as respiratory issues or things such as tb which actually could be treated if people had the correct support in place but in terms of changes to legislation in support of people who might be experiencing difficulties or homelessness actually what we see is that the government's been quite slow to respond to this where they've spoken about changes so changes to things such as private rental sector agreements these are not looking like they're going to happen perhaps in the next few years it's going to happen over a much longer period of time and that's not particularly helpful for people who are experiencing housing or homelessness issues at the moment a lot of the support is left to charities there's a lot of charities that have been set up that are hostels and things like that so in milton keynes we have the winter night shelter which runs from the beginning of november to the beginning of april and i know that in other places the uh you know it's a real short stay thing for people and it's kind of like you're given a you're given a hostile place for a couple of weeks or four weeks or whatever it is and then you're asked to leave and you're back out on the streets again and actually there's all you've had really is a bed for four weeks but in milton keynes the way that it has been set up and it has been set up in a few other areas in a similar way is that the the shelter actually has a housing officer they housed around 40 people permanently the fact that it works well in some areas and not in others means that it does need to be actually a policy and it needs to be in some ways regulated nationally by the government because it shouldn't necessarily fall to whoever happens to be in the area that wants to do something obviously you can you can tap into that and you can tap into the charity sector but i feel like there needs to be some kind of uniform thing that is in that is a supportive thing for homeless people so in terms of what the what could be done better in you know in the government in a government sense is that in milton keynes i'm going to talk a little bit about the housing first model that has um has been put in place uh since 2019 so what housing first said and what the study found was that if you if you take this rough sleeping person and you place them into accommodation not just plop them by themselves into an unfurnished flat with no support but you give them a support worker and that support worker helps them to set up their gas and their electric which they might not have had to do for a decade if they've been rough sleeping for a long period of time helps them to get registered with the gp helps them set up a bank account if they've not got one helps them get registered with drug and alcohol services takes them to all their appointments and you know provides that really intensive support and what was found in milton keynes was on day one i believe they housed 40 people and they ended up having to get more stock um but from those people that got housed i believe only one or two went back onto the streets whereas normally if you um if you kind of just take a person who's been rough sleeping for a long period of time and give them accommodation with no support that person doesn't have good odds of maintaining that tenancy but actually with with this extra support and this coordinated support because it was kind of coordinated by the support worker for them to go to all these different services it really worked so i believe and i really hope that it's going to get rolled out nationally i hope it's going to get a lot more funding i hope that it grows in milton keynes it's actually cheaper to get a house get a support worker put the homeless person in there and give them that support than it is to leave someone homeless long term because when someone's homeless long term you end up with lots of different you know crimes being committed so it really does make sense from a financial point of view even if you just want to go you know want to look at it from that angle but actually from a human angle you know just to be able to take someone who needs that support and give them that support and watch them flourish is a really beautiful thing so that's what i hope to see in the coming years nationwide from the government but the last three months of my life on the drugs i was using needles and for me that was a big game changer um like i've explained to a few people you know once you start using needles that's pretty much the end of the line for you you know you you deteriorate you lose you lose weight you lose focus in every way you lose pride dignity everything you've lost yourself completely once you get to that point and for me even though once upon a time i didn't want to be here when when muscle my mate died that's when i i i turned myself in my head and i said look you've got to do something about it you're going to get off the street otherwise you just really ain't going to be here i've got kids so i want to be there for my kids um i've done a straight detox which not many people can do it's so hard to do you know you don't four and a half weeks i was in sheer hell you know why that's all coming out of my system like i said you've got diarrhoea you've got shakes you've got headaches all sorts of things that's going on with your body um it's very painful stomach cramps all over leg pain muscle pain is really the worst scenario i could imagine you know being in prison and coming off the drugs this is it's not ideal but it's something that had to be done for me to change my life but when i did that i felt so good i felt like i got a part of me back again i was clean fresh and when i came out um when i came out the pandemic was going on and they had to house me because i didn't want anyone on the street so they put me into one of the travel lodges hotel and lucky enough i had some teams working behind me and i explained my situation um and they helped me if it wasn't for this pandemic i don't think i'd be here talking to you guys in this situation right now with me i was lucky in a way because i had the support network and if it wasn't for the winter night shelter like putting me back on my feet and even dragging me out from somewhere where i knew i was going down the wrong path excuse me i wouldn't be where i was today i mean it was a hard road i mean it's not easy surviving on the streets really isn't but then again um a lot better off than i was a lot better off than a lot of people because of the backup the support that i was getting from from friends now uh who you know volunteers at the uh the winter night shelter so yeah they did ease it is even past quite a bit they really did help that's good you know from the tent to the sleeping bags the camp bed and you know just just other little things when you know it did appear um bring me some food and just like you just had contact just that contact yeah it's important really yeah it really did help yeah but as it is every year here it's the weather and i'm 62 now so um i'm not spending anymore and when the weather starts to get cold that's when it starts to tell so uh again from december up until the fifth of january was when uh the placement came through for where i am now which is uh an organization called amicus and it uh centers on x service x service people x military to the homeless and gives them a base where they can now to make a fresh start ain't no sunshine when she's gone it's no fun when she's away ain't no sunshine when she's gone she's always gone too long anytime she goes away i wonder this time where she's gone wonder if she's going to stay [Music] [Music] she goes away [Music] i know [Music] sunshine ain't no sunshine when she's gone [Music] [Laughter] get more from the open university check out the links on screen now

Channel: OpenLearn from The Open University

Views: 98,259

Keywords: OU_, The Open University, Homelessness, homeless, injustice, pandemic, streets, support, criminalisation, incarceration, volunteers, home, drugs, violence, opportunities, PTSD, people, equality, charity, Milton Keynes, human rights, government, Prisons, society, loneliness, criminal activity, vicious circle, protection

Id: SU6qeTrKgo0

Length: 65min 42sec (3942 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022