A disturbing experience....

As I left Wahaca, warm and replete the other night, I stopped to Foursquare in (you can't inside as it's in the basement). I heard  voice behind me asking if those were avocados in the window.

I turned to see a young man smoking a cigarette and carrying a rucksack. He told me he was on his way to see if he could get into the homeless shelter down the road. He was, he said, suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia and would probably be sectioned. He rolled up his sleeves to show me wounds on his arms. He had, he said, been begging outside one of London's top hotels that day and had made £18.

Over the next 20 minutes or so, in that dark street, he told me a lot of things about his life. Some made sense, others maybe less so. He told me his name but it wouldn't be fair to tell you what it is, or too many details about his life without his permission.

What was clear, though, was that this was an incredibly vulnerable young man. He should have decent help and support. He should have a guaranteed place to live. 

There's supposed to be a safety net for people in need. It doesn't catch everybody.

Countless times I've seen politicians outline what should happen at a hustings, for example. One which comes to mind was the SAMH hustings on mental health provision ahead of the 2011 Holyrood election. It soon became obvious that there was a monumental gap between what the politicians thought was happening and what people were experiencing on the ground. 

The young man I met the other night was very keen to make sure I got safely to the tube station. I just wish that there was something I could have done for him, to make sure he was safe.

When people are being left to sleep on the streets and are not given the medical care they clearly need, something is going wrong somewhere. 

Hume reveals heartbreaking homelessness statistics

I've long said that I want a Government to decide that it's going to sort out housing. During my years working for Willie Rennie as his caseworker, by far the biggest tragedy I could see unfolding before me was housing. Every week we'd have around 5 new families wanting, no, needing to be rehoused.

Maybe their family had grown or two families had amalgamated meaning a current property was too small. Maybe they'd had to take a private let, sacrificing their priority on the local authority list, but paying out more than they could afford in rent. Maybe a relationship had ended or they'd been put out by family. Maybe illness had meant that their current home was impossible for them. I remember returning once from holiday to the awful news that one person who'd been waiting for a long time to be rehoused had actually died.

The problem is, of course, that the supply of social housing has never recovered from Margaret Thatcher's "right to buy" policy. Forcing local authorities to sell houses at knock down prices and not letting them build any more has had horrendous consequences for people needing affordable housing today. There simply is not enough to go round.

In Scotland, the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition between 1999 and 2007 passed legislation aimed at ending homelessness by 2012.  Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament show that we are still some way from meeting that target.

It's horrifying to think that a minimum of 2000 families are living in temporary accommodation. This might, if they're lucky, be a flat, usually in the sort of area nobody would choose. However, they could be moved out of this to another part of their local authority area at any time. Imagine, for example, being made homeless in Dunfermline in the south west of Fife. You could be put in temporary accommodation in St Andrew's, a good hour away. How do you get your kids to school? How do you get to work if you do shifts at unsocial hours if you don't have a car? And you could be moved to another part of this pretty big kingdom at any time.

And that accommodation, like I said, might not be a flat. It might be bed and breakfast, in which case as a family you'd be expected to leave during the day. Where do you go? It might be a homeless hostel, where you have to share with strangers.  Can you imagine how horrendously difficult it would be to live in those circumstances? Most people reading this will wake up in a warm house, with a washing machine to hand to clean their clothes and cooking facilities they can use when they feel like eating and space to rest and relax. There will doubtless be enough room for people to escape from each other when they've had a row. Imagine your whole life, your whole family in one room with possessions that you can carry. How would that affect a child?

Have a read of Shelter's article on what it's like to be homeless and you'll get an idea. The horror of the reality is being experienced now by far too many people and particularly children.

The Liberal Democrats' housing spokesman at Holyrood, Jim Hume, has today released the findings of his Freedom of Information requests to local authorities about the number of children and families in temporary housing. Glasgow, Aberdeenshire and South Lanarkshire aren't included, so this is a minimum figure. Basically we have 2073 families in temporary accommodation and this is at 1st October. 1271 had been there for more than 3 months and 779 for more than 6 months. By anyone's standards, that's just wrong.

Housing affects so much else, your health, your ability to work, your sense of security and it's vital that someone has the political will to sort it out. This is too important an issue for the SNP just to blame the coalition government for cuts or say that independence would sort everything out.  They have £30 billion, the entire Scottish budget, to spend as they please. If they want to, they can build more houses with the powers they currently have rather than halve the budget and forget their pledge to build 6000 new houses every year. If they want to.

We need to have not just an intelligent debate, but actual action now to make sure that everyone in need has a roof over their head and a long term strategy in place to make sure it stays that way.  It's not just about building new houses, it's about making better use of those we have. Ewan Hoyle has some ideas over at Lib Dem Voice about elderly people in larger houses sharing with younger people, maybe students, who help out with jobs around the place in a mutually convenient and non exploitative way.

It's not just homelessness we have to deal with, though, it's poor quality social housing with damp, condensation, leaky doors and windows and with appallingly bad energy efficiency so that they're difficult to keep warm. Something has to be done about them, too, and fast. There's no point in investing in education if kids haven't got somewhere warm to do their homework or they lie freezing in their beds at night.

I'll give the final word to Jim Hume:

“Thousands of families with children are facing a hard Christmas in temporary accommodation. We can only imagine how hard this is, especially for the 779 families that have been without a permanent home for over 6 months.
 “January marks the beginning of the year in which Scotland’s homelessness commitment is due to be met. “The SNP Government must ensure that it’s fully committed to ending 2012 with every homeless person having access to a permanent home. “A good start will be looking again at its planned 50% cut to the affordable housing budget and Alex Neil needs to face up to his government’s U-turn on the 6000 new socially rented houses each year
 “We also need to see a more innovative approach to tackling homelessness across Scotland. “We cannot afford to leave so many families out in the cold this Christmas.” 

Robert Brown and Anne McLaughlin stand up for Glasgow's asylum seekers

One of the things that has made me absolutely furious this past week is the disgraceful disregard and lack of understanding that Glasgow City Council and the UK Border Agency seem to have for the vulnerable asylum seekers who are housed in Glasgow. These two organisations are arguing about money and over 1300 vulnerable people in almost 600 households are caught in the crossfire. The Council has had a contract until now to provide temporary accommodation to  asylum seekers. This expires in February. It hasn't been renewed because the Council wants more money.

Last week, the affected families received letters from the UK Border Agency saying that they could be asked to move, at 3-5 days notice, with one or two bags each to anywhere in the Scotland region. Scotland is a big place, stretching all the way from Dumfries and Galloway to Caithness and Sutherland on the mainland 400 miles away.  That's not counting the northern or western isles, which are also part of this fabulous country.

Neither the Council nor the UK Border Agency seem to be looking at what an enforced move will mean for those families. Children who are settled at school and have been so for some years could be uprooted at a critical stage in the school year. That is just completely unacceptable. The UK Border Agency and Glasgow City Council should hang their heads in shame at the distress and upset they have jointly caused.

This issue brought a touch of seriousness to an otherwise pathetic First Minister's Questions the other day. Anne McLaughlin, who of course had done so much work on behalf of asylum seekers, including Florence and Precious Mhango, first asked about it and Robert Brown, Liberal Democrat MSP for Glasgow followed with this?

 Does the First Minister share my view that the priority now must be to retain asylum seekers in their current homes and to keep their children in their current schools? Regardless of the management arrangements that are contracted for by the UKBA, stability and security are vital for such people, many of whom, as the First Minister touched on, have gone through horrendous experiences at the hands of oppressive regimes abroad.

Do the protocols regarding the treatment of asylum seekers that were arrived at with such great difficulty between successive Scottish Governments and the most recent UK Government give the Scottish Government the opportunity to discuss practical solutions to the issues at hand with the Border Agency and, indeed, the UK Government?

The FM's helpful reply was

I  must confess that I have never found the UK Border Agency to be among the foremost advocates of the respect agenda between Westminster and Scotland. Nonetheless, given that the important matter here is the treatment of people who are in a vulnerable situation, we will take up Robert Brown's suggestion and will seek to use the protocols to defend their position.

In my experience the UK Border Agency takes no notice of anyone, so it's not just the Scottish Government it disrespects. I have no time for them at all and it's high time some Government ministers shook the place up completely and made it take a more compassionate, civilised tone with people.

I feel, though that there's a bit of a wider issue here, though, generally, about how we treat homeless households. If a family is made homeless, their local  Council has to give them accommodation, but it could be anywhere within that Council area and they can be moved on at very short notice to other accommodation which similarly can be anywhere in their area. Now that's fine if it's fairly compact Council area, but look at Fife. I've seen people in desperate housing need from Dunfermline be put in Cupar, Glenrothes and Kirkcaldy. In some circumstances it's meant that the adults in the household can't continue to work because they're away from their support network, or they work shifts and there's no public transport available outside peak times. Although generally the kids get to stay at their school, they often face a long journey to get there.

This is a function of there simply not being enough affordable social housing and so far nobody seems to be coming up with suggestions to alleviate that. When Governments and Councils draw up procedures and work out how to deliver services they really need to think about what it actually means for people to go through them and try to draw up the service round the needs of the people and not themselves. The way homeless people are treated is just one example of how services fail to do that. And what the UK Border Agency seeks to do to those asylum seekers in Glasgow  is even worse.

Strictly's Camilla sleeps rough for charity

For seven series of Strictly Come Dancing, Camilla Dallerup entertained us with her talented choreography. Who can forget the dramatic Tango she did with James Martin, where she was the doll and he was the toymaker to Mein Herr from Cabaret or the broadway themed Showdance she put together for Tom Chambers?

Last night she and her fiance, Hollyoaks actor Kevin Sacre slept rough in Hatfield to raise money and awareness of homelessness. Their Twitter feeds tell the story of their very cold night on the streets.

Around one in the morning, Camilla asked:

How do homeless people cope in this cold? They don't even have thr warm clothes we have.

When I retweeted this, Andrew Hickey, who blogs here, replied:

Unfortunately homeless people *don't* cope in the cold. Talked to one the other day who said two friends of his had died of exposure and he'd been hospitalised with hypothermia himself.

I've said before, it shocks me to the core that in this day and age, in one of the most affluent countries in the world, people have to sleep outside. Surely we should be able to provide a roof over everyone's head, a space that they can call their own.

Camilla and Kevin weren't the only ones sleeping rough last night. Westmorland and Lonsdale Lib Dem MP Tim Farron joined an event in the frozen north at Kendal Castle where the temperature was -6. Thanks to local Cllr Chris Hogg for alerting me to that via the wonders of Twitter.

Guest Post by Wendy Fraser - Crisis at Christmas

To me it's unbelievable that as one of the most affluent countries in the world, we can't provide a roof over everybody's head. It's bad enough that people sleep rough at any time, but in the depths of Winter, and this hellish Winter at that, the fact that people are sleeping outdoors in Princes Street Gardens is something we should be deeply ashamed of.

I'm very grateful to Wendy Fraser (aka PJ) for taking the time to write down this moving account of her time volunteering for Crisis in London these past two Christmases.


I read with interest, and despair, the report by BBC Scotland on Friday entitled ‘Homeless urged not to sleep rough’ Although the article highlighted the plight of a homeless woman in Edinburgh, it barely scratched the frozen surface of a national issue that gets neither the media attention nor the financial investment needed to improve the harrowing existence of the residents of our streets, doorways and parks. Was I the only one who felt that this portrayed the homeless as ‘choosing’ to sleep on freezing streets when a bed was available if they would only ask? Let alone the underlying tone of the article that the council were providing adequate facilities.

Crisis is a national charity that supports the homeless and for the past two years I have had the privilege of volunteering with them during their Christmas campaigns in London. Over the past 39 years Crisis have opened up shelters across London during the Christmas week to give thousands of homeless people a safe place to sleep, hot food and access to medical care. Whilst what they do is a logistical triumph and a truly invaluable service, it simply isn’t nearly enough to support these people back into society. It’s honestly quite a grounding experience to be involved in something like Crisis; you can’t avoid the destitution of some of these people nor the hopelessness of their situations. Neither can you avoid the desperation of the support workers who are continually battling against cuts in their budgets and facilities being closed despite the numbers of users increasing at an alarming rate.

One of the first centres I worked in two years ago had a high proportion of Polish and Eastern European ‘guests’ who had come to London to work on the building of Terminal 5 and found themselves jobless and homeless, and on the whole unable to communicate in English, after the work was completed. This Christmas it was estimated that 60% of the guests were Polish and Eastern European (I’m deliberately distinguishing between the two after a rather comical geography lesson from a Polish man who drew me a map of Europe and insisted that Poland was central Europe and everywhere else lay north, south, east or west of Poland). That percentage is expected to continue to rise.

This year I was struck by how many of the guests had just been released from prison, all of them with nowhere to go other than the streets. I spoke to one lady who was 74 and coughed, spluttered and wheezed the whole time I chatted with her. She had TB (the non-infectious variant she assured me!) and carried a chart with her with photographs of the pills she had to take and the order in which she had to take them, she couldn’t read. Her one wish was to get back into prison because at least there she had a bed and food, but not safety - she cackled and coughed simultaneously at that point.

The youngest person I came across in the shelters was an 18 year old boy, the oldest was in his 80s but he couldn’t remember exactly how old he was. Poverty and homelessness can quite literally happen to anybody. A few strokes of bad luck and any one of us could share the plight of those struggling to exist on the streets. Yes, many of them are alcoholics and drug addicts, prostitution and crime are the norm not the exception. But every person I spoke to wanted a different life, a way to escape the downward spiral of homelessness. For some of them the only escape they could envisage was to end their lives.

I listened to their stories, held their hands and gave them hugs when they cried. It wasn’t enough. I felt useless and inadequate when faced by their desperation. I can only hope to change a tiny little bit of their lives very briefly. When I choose who to vote for in the General Election (and I haven’t yet), I will be looking to see which party truly cares enough about our homeless to make a lasting difference. Less talk about the rich and more action for the poor!