Homelessness crisis is the result of years of neglect
This is a really important piece of social commentary about the phenomenon of rough sleeping which assails many small places where we just wouldn’t previously have expected to find people in such visibly desperate circumstances. Perhaps they were always there?? Makes you (me) think…..
We can look closer to home than Germany, the US and Finland to combat rough sleeping (Hundreds of people are dying on our streets. Let’s give them homes, Editorial, 3 October). As a result of Blair’s cross-departmental initiative introduced in 1997, rough sleeping stood at 532 on any given night in England in 2001. By 2018 it had risen to an estimated 5,000 people, and, as your editorial points out, 726 people, or on average two a day, die on the streets.
Yes, a Housing First approach is urgently needed, not least because of the neglect of social housing by successive governments over the last 20 years. A desperate situation has been compounded by draconian cuts since 2010, the impact of universal credit on the most vulnerable, and the cutting to the bone of preventive services to address mental health, drug and relationship problems when they first arise. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are creating a welfare system underpinned by punishment, regulation and deterrence, that legitimises the sacrificing of the street homeless.