The difference between ‘The bleeding obvious’ and ‘Insight’

I was in a coffee shop with some of my best friends. I was a bit irritated, but my friends were outraged. We weren’t seeing things the same way. My friends, like me, have an interest in social justice and were relaying the latest injustice they had been made aware of. They’d heard that their local council had been gatekeeping homelessness services. A rough sleeper had been to the district council and been told that they wouldn’t be able to have an interview for another week. Until then he would have to sleep rough or sofa surf.

I didn’t add that he would likely continue to sleep rough until such a time as he could provide cast iron proof that he is as vulnerable as he said he was. I didn’t say that if he has mental health problems he would find it even harder to prove that he was that ill. I didn’t say that if he was lucky enough to get temporary accommodation it would probably be a long way out of his local area. I didn’t say that he would probably struggle to get through to a housing officer on the phone for the entirety of his involvement with them.

If he was lucky enough to get accepted as homeless at all.

I said none of this because it's bloody obvious and I am sick of saying it. I am sick of hearing it. I bet local council’s are sick of it too. I live and breathe these complaints from my clients. This is how it is.

But if it isn’t worth saying, why write a blog about it?

And herein lies the nugget that it's taken me a 6 month training course to get to grips with. The course, Systems Changers, was about empowering frontline workers and gathering up frontline worker insight. The word ‘insight’ has been bandied around a lot over the last 6 months. To start off with it confused me and I didn’t really appreciate why it mattered. We explained cases we had come across, much like the ones above, but people listened intently. They wrote it down. We took time to analyse it together. Apart from that we were also given support to develop new skills and tools. We’ve found that the combination of the two has enabled us to begin to fix some of the broken things we’ve seen.

We’ve also begun to tell our stories. I started this blog because none of this stuff is obvious. I’ve realised that most people genuinely don’t know. It is shocking, and if it's not, it should be.

As a support worker my life is spent dealing with the systems we rely on to pick us up when life falls apart. Its part of why we pay our taxes. But I’m coming to realise that most people don’t know how broken these systems are. They don’t see how the lack of resources is putting so much pressure on homeless mothers, or curtailing addicts’ roads to recovery, or preventing a mentally unwell person getting well again. Most people do not know how stressful it is to be a Housing Officer in today’s context. I don’t know, but I think I could guess.

In my job there are several conversations that I have very regularly with newly homeless people. The one that comes to mind now is about how you’ve paid thousands in taxes over many years, but that this does not guarantee you temporary accommodation now that you are homeless. After this we discuss how you’re only homeless because you lost your job. I explain that actually the fact you are fit for work excludes you from the council’s duty to provide practical help. We then move onto how to be safe while you sleep rough. The conversation usually comes to an end when I offer you a sleeping bag and an extra coat.

The reason I have this conversation so often is because so many people don’t realise that this is where we’ve got to. The legislation that shapes the above conversation has been in use for a long time now. In some ways that is not a new thing. But what is new is the level to which public services have now been squeezed. Councils’ housing teams up and down the country have less money to do an increasingly large job. Social Services are in the same position. It's not good enough to shake one’s fist at your housing officer. Gatekeeping is a symptom of a broken system. The lack of resources to do the job well is the problem, and that issue is bigger than the housing officer you may be frustrated with. (In actual fact your housing officer is probably doing their best for you in an incredibly difficult environment, or has been worn down by the adversity they face when they try to do their job well.)

But this is why it is important for frontline workers to tell our stories, it's one of the ways we can work towards a solution. We need to share our insights. We need to collaborate to figure out why and how the system is broken. We need to work towards the solutions that will move us to a more compassionate way of supporting broken people. We need to look past our own outrage and call out the broken bits of the system so that they can be fixed. We can’t do that unless we start by sharing our insight.