When is homelessness a choice?
When it comes to the choices and opportunities in your life, what first comes to mind?
Owning (or paying off the mortgage on) your own home, perhaps? Progressing in your career, doing work that feels good or aligns with your purpose, ideally? How about enjoying quality time with friends and family — having fun or interesting experiences — that your salary (or ability to borrow) affords you?
All pretty common life goals to strive for, but for the 270,000 people currently experiencing homelessness in England alone., these kinds of hopes and dreams are just that little bit further out of reach (Shelter, 2023). Despite the collective term we’ve coined, this particular experience of destitution doesn’t begin or end with having a roof over your head.
Does Work Pay?
It starts with whether or not you’re able to afford to said roof. While housing is a vital lever in addressing the endemic homelessness experienced across the country, the 3.5 million people paid less than a living wage in 2022 (Living Wage Foundation, 2023) and 1.03 million people on zero-hours contracts find that making ends meet is exceptionally difficult (Statista, 2023).
As one of the biggest monthly costs facing individuals and families, it’s not surprising people struggle to meet ever-increasing rent and mortgage costs alongside rising inflation and the cost of living crisis, leading to almost 72,000 people experiencing in-work homelessness (ITV, 2023). So much for expecting employment to ail all societal ills.
While much focus is given to the stretch placed on DWP customers — stripping back housing benefits, tightening up Universal Credit claims and forcing people into jobs they’re neither skilled nor motivated to do well — where’s the heat for employers benefitting from the labour of people whose salary can’t offer basic safety and security?
Where to Call Home?
Being paid a real living wage is essential in helping vulnerable people avoid homelessness, though it has to be met with adequate housing provision. Yet, when social housing waiting lists are 1.2 million people long, and private rented housing is double the cost of monthly rent on a council property, your choices are pretty limited. (GOV.UK, 2023)
Should you ever be unfortunate enough to find yourself without financial means or a home to call your own, it’s at this point that your local authority ideally springs into action. Providing adult care and housing alongside benefits from the DWP and healthcare from the NHS, this safety net is all that keeps you from sofa surfing, staying in hostels or rough sleeping.
Yet, with 40% of real-time funding being stripped out of local government since 2010, and housing provision — both private and public — improving little in that time, councils across the U.K. are struggling to support even those afforded a statutory duty. (Institute for Government, 2020). Prioritising women, family and the extremely vulnerable, it’s why men make up the majority of the 4–5% of the homeless population who rough sleep. (GOV.UK, 2023)
Helping Hands?
There’s nowhere for people to go, whether they turn to their employers, government or own community, as those most vulnerable to experiencing homelessness tend to be people who have little or no support network to rely on.
Relationship breakdowns, whether people who have lost a spouse or partner, women escaping domestic violence or LGBTQ+ youth whose parents disown them, are some of the most common reasons people become at risk. Leaving the armed forces, social care or being an ex-offender are all situations in which people are likely to have limited support systems in place too.
Mental health and addiction challenges — often a result of poverty and the strain it places on friendships, families and neighbourhoods — contribute too. If you didn’t struggle with related health issues before experiencing homelessness, the additional trauma that comes from such circumstances only increases the probability. Numbing the pain when you feel worthless to society might be the only thing that makes sense.
Choosing People or Profit?
Homelessness is a choice, just not one made by the person experiencing it. It’s a choice made by business leaders and HR departments, plus property developers and landlords, choosing to prioritise profit over the people, which conversely, they rely on to deliver their bottom line.
It’s a choice made by politicians and government departments too, who often fall short in supporting the people they exist to serve, and in short-term political cycles, creating the policies and infrastructure that people living with generational poverty during late-stage capitalism struggle to navigate.
On top of the difficult life experiences which make someone vulnerable to homelessness, the brutality of navigating assumptions-based, disjointed and punitive housing, adult care, health and benefits services only adds to impacted people’s pain, Suggesting such a life is something someone chooses only adds insult to injury.
What to Choose?
What if instead, we asked people what choices and opportunities they’d like to have? What if work not only paid, but allowed people to leverage their inherent strengths and learned skills, whether they come from former work experience — 88% of people have worked before — or the strength and resilience it took to work their way out. (Crisis, 2013).
In thinking homelessness is a choice, we make so many judgements on people’s worthiness and potential. Yet, with employment providing both a way to prevent and relieve homelessness, it’s our personal beliefs, organisational cultures and meritocratic structures which get in the way of seeing what’s truly valuable.
At Noisy Cricket, our work at HI Futue — removing organisational barriers to homeless employment — has been so insightful. Working with government, businesses and charities, plus 15 people impacted by homelessness, we’ve learned that it takes people in positions of power to look beyond perceptions, shift approaches to recruitment and connect with people to truly realise potential.
So, for those in positions of such power, what will you choose to do?
