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You know what? Don’t

Amid rising rents, food and bills, unmet health needs and continuing no-fault evictions, rough sleeping rose steeply last year. If it continues at the same rate it will be close to the highest level of recent times in 2017 when more than 4,700 people were counted on the streets on a single night.

OK, so 5k people. Actually, it’s closer to 10k pass through that state over a year.

Rough sleeping will head back towards record levels unless Labour fills a looming £1bn shortfall in frontline funding when deals agreed by the last government expire in the coming months, dozens of homelessness charities have said.

£1 billion, eh? £100,000 per person. We could – very happily – buy 5 years leases for each of those homeless with that sort of sum.

Difficult to conclude other than that there are a few too many Tarquins and Jocastas dipping their ladle in that gravy, eh?

21 thoughts on “You know what? Don’t”

  1. Are there no prisons ? Are the Union workhouses still in operation ?

    Where there is government money, there us grift and somewhere a charity CEO earning £200,000.

    These ‘5,000’ homeless are usually the hardcore refuseniks, for whom trying to provide accommodtaion is a waste of time. They are incapable of living a normal settled life, except by coercion.

    The rest are transitory and probably only need help for a month, until a benefits stream can be secured. Charities such as Emmaus are designed to help them. Proviing low cost rental properties for a limited period is where the money could be spent.

  2. Otto nails it. For some, rough-sleeping is a lifestyle choice; for others, it’s a temporary state.

    And there’s more than enough funding available to deal with it, but much of it’s wasted through the inefficiencies of “inter-agency working”.

    Btw, in my experience, “Tarquins and Jocastas” tend to steer clear of dealing with the (often smelly/violent/crazy/addicted) homeless: they prefer more abstract causes (eg climate change, saving the rain forests) with more opportunities for virtue-signalling.

  3. Otto and Theo are bang on as usual. There’s a persistent’rough sleeper’ (and beggar) st my local Tube station, and anguished calls on the local Facebook for him to be helped.

    He has a council house. He just prefers to beg.

  4. By the current definitions I was homeless when I was at university.
    One year, my summer tenancy ended on 31st August, but my term-time tenancy started on 14th September*. For two weeks I had all my stuff piled in a friend’s living room and slept on the settee.

    *Really bizarrely, both tenancies were from the university.

  5. in my experience, “Tarquins and Jocastas” tend to steer clear of dealing with the (often smelly/violent/crazy/addicted) homeless

    The CEO of Shelter is called Polly and she was earning £122,500 in 2017. She came into the charity via other charities, journalism and PR. I doubt she’s spent much time junkie-wrangling. It is her and her ilk demanding ever-increasing funding for a small but persistent problem. I’d bet the people at the business end are either volunteers or earning a quarter of what she earned nearly a decade ago.

    The easiest way to get the numbers down would be to deport foreign vagrants. There’s a few hundred in London alone and I have not seen a British Big Issue seller for years. Then see who is left and how to deal with them.

    I suspect the answer is ‘junkies and the mentally ill’ and the only way to get them off the street is forcibly.

  6. The easiest way to get the numbers down would be to deport foreign vagrants. There’s a few hundred in London alone and I have not seen a British Big Issue seller for years. Then see who is left and how to deal with them.

    As I recall, at accession, Romania and Bulgaria had a 7 year period where they weren’t allowed to make use of EU working abroad rules, but by becoming “self-employed” (such as selling “Dah Beeg Ishoo”), the whole panoply of benefits and welfare abuse became available to them. Mostly Roma, so doubly racist if you called them out on their theft.

  7. Bloke in North Dorset

    The easiest way to get the numbers down would be to deport foreign vagrants. There’s a few hundred in London

    When I was working in London and staying at the Union Jack Club just off Marble Arch there was a homeless community who appeared to be from Romania or that sort of area camped out at the Arch. They were there for at least the the 5 years I was doing the job from 2012 to 2017and appeared to be professional beggars and probably patty crime such as pickpocketing and 3-card tricks on Oxford street. The authorities didn’t appear interested in the slightest.

    My guess is they were Roma and like the grooming gangs nobody in authority wanted to do anything about if for fear of being labelled racist.

  8. jgh October 10, 2024 at 7:33 am

    Annual Wandering Scholar Week. The university throws everyone out two weeks before the next year start ostensibly to allow ‘deep cleaning’. The deep cleaning takes a few hours, leaving the accommodation ready for the lucrative conference guests.

  9. In my limited, anecdotal experience, the only real beneficiaries of most charities are the management. I once knew a lady who collected the donation boxes for a cancer charity from the local pubs. She was in her 60s and pretty much a wreck but struggled around the pubs putting the containers in the boot of her car. She was a volunteer, of course. She came in one day clearly angry about something. When asked, she raved about being offered a job at the local branch office to send the summary sheets off to head office – it was pre-internet- and was offered £30,000 pa. (I was earning about £25,000 at the time, I think).She was outraged that all the boxes she collected in a given week would be used to pay her wages. They really done make them like that anymore…

  10. The CEO of Shelter is called Polly and she was earning £122,500 in 2017.

    Shelter is a campaign group focussed on “housing justice” and does FA for the homeless. Which bears out my point that generally the Pollys, Tarquins and Jocastas avoid working on the front line or even in small or local housing charities. The “outreach workers” from local outfits are often tiresomely left-wing, but at least they get their hands dirty.

  11. Shelter was dodgy back in the 60s when it started. It was well known that pieces of choice accommodation ended up with employees or mates of employees. There was a guy got himself into a squat on Haverstock Hill & then got right of abode on some legal technicality & subsequently was bought out of it for a 6 figure sum in the 90s. He used to drink in the Steels, over the road. Quite the prosperous businessman, he was.
    The social end of accommodation has always been deeply suspicious. You have people disposing of what is a valuable asset. You don’t think they won’t moneterise that? I once bought a housing association tenancy off of one for a couple of grand in cash. So you could pour millions into it, but it wouldn’t necessarily house any vagrants. Jocasta & Tarquin might get themselves nice gaffs though.
    Professional beggars. There were some lads I used to see around the West End. Huddled in doorways in a blanket with a plastic cup. They used to meet in a North London pub to divvy up the take. It is a business. Those begging pitches are valuable assets have to be defended. So they work as a team. Do shifts on the pitch. Put the boot behind interlopers.

  12. Of course these days, Jocasta & Tarquin are more likely to be Mohammed or M’Bongo or something unspellable in Albanian.

  13. Let’s take a flexible and pragmatic approach. The homeless bloke we know by name sleeps on a bench outside the cathedral, except when it’s raining, when he beds down in the archway to our garages. He’s no trouble. My wife buys him a steak slice and a big bottle of Diet Coke most days, and the lady in the cafe donates his morning coffee and a cake. That’s all he seems to need. He is constantly being offered accommodation by one of the many charities here, but turns it down. Occasionally he gives it a try, but is quickly back here as “it didn’t work out”.

    At the other extreme, there are noisy aggressive drugged-up homeless blokes in the shopping centre. One of them has a vicious mangy pit-bull the size of a bear. What they need is approaching every day by a big team of police with a provocative attitude and a marksman backing them up. They need a fucking good hiding, and a bullet through the dog. They’d soon see the sense in a more settled and restrained lifestyle.

    Very diverse category, the homeless.

  14. Persistent rough sleepers will have refused help. Half are illegal migrants, the rest have other issues such as drugs, mental health which makes them also turn down the sheltered offer.
    You can halve the problem with deportation.
    The rest is not so easy. Possibly by ordering a load of long sleeved jackets and building a big psych hospital. Although that migt be worse for the poor buggers.

  15. “If it continues at the same rate”…
    Everything after an extrapolation from two data points should be ignored.

    What we can say though is that if it does continue at the same rate then in spring 2082, everyone in the UK will be sleeping rough, plus a few extra people.

  16. “£1 billion, eh? £100,000 per person. We could – very happily – buy 5 years leases for each of those homeless with that sort of sum.”

    I don’t think you’re comparing like things. A lease just buys you the living space. Possibly some furniture. Possibly some utilities.

    But not maintenance of the space (as opposed to common areas). Even things like light bulb changes. Or security, which won’t be a small charge.

    I’m not saying that this accounts for much of the 100k per person, but there is a difference.

  17. The CEO of Shelter is called Polly and she was earning £122,500 in 2017.

    No, she was *PAID* £122,500. Bolleaux was she earning it.

  18. Wife did some work in northern Canada and recounts the times that homeless people would leave the emergency shelter that opened when temperatures dropped into minus numbers (could hit -50) because they didn’t want to stay there .

  19. It’s just not worth the effort if it doesn’t cost a least 1bn. Because otherwise it would suggest that it could already have been done, out of current budgets, years ago…

  20. Back to my favourite topic of the Islamic Republic of Bradistan…a few years ago my Mrs who lives in Leafy Didsbury said there’s a programme called “Bradford On Duty”

    I lasted 15 minutes when the lying liars claimed they were clamping down on crossroads begging and building “affordable housing” for homeless…the community nurses were wonderful, but as soon as the Plod and Hinchcliffe and England turned up I nearly turned into a 70s rock star and trashed her living room.

    Google “Bradford Live” and also the amount of rejected planning permissions that result in old mills spontaneously combustion…

    I remember learning about Rotten Boroughs at first school (we didn’t have Primary and Upper Schools then)

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