satyrica

One of the most interesting things to come out of our actually fairly tolerable two days of training at the end of last week was a more coherent understanding of Westminster's homelessness polcy. Central government has washed its hands of homelessness funding by devolving it to Local Authorities, LAs will provide direct help (through HPUs) only to cases of extreme vulnerability (old age, poor health, pregnancy etc.) and instead argue that they fulfil their responsibility by in turn funding charitable organisations to tackle the problem of homelessness more generally. Of course by providing funding they are able to blackmail (emotive language, moi?) the charities into working in a way that adheres to their priorities and values by threatening to *withdraw* funding, and so the war of ideologies begins.

One recent example is the pressure for organisations only to provide services to homeless people with a significant link to the borough they are in (cos Southwark don't want to be forking out to feed Lambeth's homeless people, thank you very much) and are prevented from doing any more work with them than helping them go back to Brent/Birmingham/Scotland/Korea/Wherever They Came From. For Westminster, being the borough comprising pretty much the significant majority of cenral London, including all the 'new to London' hotspots, like Victoria and Waterloo, the Strand and the Parks, this is obviously quite an issue.

Having found that, although there has been significant success in getting long-term entrenched rough sleepers off the streets, just as many new-to-the-streets rough sleepers are popping up to replace them and carry on scaring the tourists, their strategy has cranked up a notch. [On the subject of scaring the tourists, one of the most entertaiing things I saw on an outreach shift I did the other week was a homeless guy, arms stretched above his head in pantomime villain glee, running towards a coachload of 14 year old girls who'd just come out of some West End Theatreland school jaunt and shouting: "Which one of you wants to be my wife?" Cue much squealing and scattering from herd of teenage girls.]

Westminster's ideology has now moved on from caring to enforcement, away from hand-wringing "look at the poor people the system has failed" liberalism, towards "these individuals are a nuisance to society" vilification. Hence ASBOs, bans on drinking on the street in the borough, campaigns to stop people giving money to beggars, attempts to pull funding from outreach work, to stop soup runs and anything seen to make life on the street 'sustainable' and punitive measures against any who don't engage with services.

I guess for me it's about choice: most rough sleepers are trying to get themselves sorted in a variety of determined and chaotic fashions, they'll adapt to new systems and procedures, they'll just have an even more uncomfortable time of it along the way. There is a small but significant minority, however, for whom it's a way of life that, without discernible mental health problems or immigration issues, they choose to follow: but increasingly it's looking like a choice that Westminster is not prepared to allow them. Likewise one of our Board of Directors here wants us to database everytime someone accesses our service (even if they don't engage for anything more than food and a shower) so we can track all of their patterns of movement: there are some small service-delivery advantages conceivable from this, but far more it sounds like some proto-Orwellian precipice of social care teetering over into social control.