Stop. Let’s tell the real story.
Can you spare any real change?
I used to see Sarah a lot in Bounds Green, on my commute to and from work where I ran the marketing team of a global company. It was a great job, I loved my colleagues and travelled the world getting to work on a lot of the things I love: writing, communicating and figuring out how teams of people can work well together. Sarah and I would some days just say Hi and other days share a cup of tea or every so often dinner. Sarah is someone who has been homeless for a long time.
Through chatting to her, I started to research what solutions exist for homelessness. It turns out there are a lot. So many that I took the serious decision to leave my job to learn more. I went to volunteer for 5 months full time in a day centre that serves people who are experiencing homelessness, I visited Crisis and St Martin in the Fields to interview them about their experience.
Did you know homelessness is not a problem that’s just part of society? It sounds sort of obvious to say, doesn’t it, but it’s not actually normal. Finland has almost eradicated street homelessness.We had almost eradicated homelessness in the UK. It started to rise again but from 2010 grew quickly, and has now more than doubled according to the Government’s own figures. I felt I’d been seeing more and more people asking if I could spare any change, and it turned out that that feeling was true: I had.
I also contacted The LSE. They have an amazing piece of research that shows how we have been led to normalise homelessness with that seemingly innocuous phrase you hear all the time: “Everyone is only one pay cheque away from being homeless.” That simply is not true. Homelessness is entirely predictable. If you are privileged you are unlikely to become homeless if you lose your job. If you experienced poverty as a child, you are highly likely to become homeless if you lose your job.
Back to Sarah. She enabled me to see inside council homes and temporary housing provided by Barnet Council. I’ve wanted to share what I saw for a long time. I talked to friends at the time. I saw the UN report on poverty in the UK publish and be buried, and wondered how I could share what I had seen.
It was seeing Brian Coleman on the BBC that jolted me out of the imposter syndrome that stops me writing and sharing my views more widely.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I grew up in a council house, but the properties I have seen in Barnet, and that Annie (an NHS administrator) and her family are forced to exist in, don’t come anywhere near the lovely home my family and I lived in. Bernie Sanders recently asked “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” Brian Coleman made it painfully clear that Barnet local authority leadership is not. He held her in such contempt. He stated that the BBC filming was a “stitch up” and that “the council owes them nothing.”
Grouping people together as “homeless people” or “council tenants” means we can forget about the individuals like Sarah, and like Annie. It’s exactly the same as suggesting homelessness could happen to anyone. It leaves us feeling like Brian so brazenly states — that nothing can be done. But these are people. And something can be done. We need leaders who will be ruthless not in the way they talk to a woman who dared share her story because she was desperate, but in their commitment to people and their right to somewhere safe to live.
We are Stop. Let’s tell the real story. Click here and here to read just some of our testimony to inequality in the UK. We’d like to tell your story of austerity too. Sign up to hear how.
