Sammy Khader lives in a good neighbourhood – close to Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.
He and his new friend Thomas Tulley know the best places to eat and drink. Heating is an increasing problem and the noise from passing traffic can be a nuisance.
Their postcode might be exclusive but their chosen addresses are not: a sheltered door-step, an alcove or a shop-front after closing hours. Anywhere that they will not be moved on by the police.
Today they’re in Victoria Embankment Gardens, a pleasant sitting area in the shadow of some major government departments just a stone’s throw from Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Deck-chairs allow office workers to sit with their lunch but for Sammy and Thomas this is a quiet refuge to grab the sleep they missed the night before because of rain and wind.
“Look, the reason I came to London this past summer was too deeply personal,” explained Sammy. “It had to do with family, that’s all I’ll say.”
Thomas’s reasons are also personal: a relationship with a girl, now gone. “I just didn’t want to go home to get the mickey taken out of me, so I stayed to get work here. I did, packaging food takeaways but could not afford the rent. So, here I am, I never planned it, it just happened.”
Across the way, Jonn Blacker is sleeping at a table outside a Starbucks cafe. No one bothers him or moves him on. He, too, is homeless. Jonn spent his 21st birthday sleeping rough because he says he had nowhere else to go. He drank himself silly that night in June. Now, by day, he sits outside the café. Someone passes and hands him a coffee, which he places his hands around for warmth. At night, he will bed down on the doorstep of some exclusive address. “Man, I don’t know how to get out of this,” is all he says. “ Just don’t know.”
“Ministers Have No Idea”
The sharp rise in the number of homeless people over the past five years, fuelled by increasing private sector rents and cuts in housing benefits, is costing the public purse more than £1bn a year, according to a report by the Government’s own spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO).
The numbers of the homeless have increased every year since 2010, with rises in rough sleeping and households living in temporary accommodation but the NAO says ministers have been slow to understand the problem or take a strategic approach to it. It criticises ministers for taking what it calls a “light touch” approach – critics call it a ‘do-nothing approach’ – to the problem.
Ministers have no grip on the causes or costs of more people being homeless and have shown no inclination to grasp how the problem has been fuelled by housing benefit cuts, the NAO says. It concludes that the government’s attempts to address homelessness since 2011 have failed to deliver value for money.
Meg Hillier MP, the chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee, said the NAO had highlighted a national scandal. “This reports illustrates the very real human cost of the government’s failure to ensure people have access to affordable housing,” she said.
Homelessness has grown most sharply among households renting privately who struggle to afford to live in expensive areas such as London and the south-east, the NAO found. Private rents in the capital have risen by 24% since the start of the decade, while average earnings have increased by just 3%.
Cuts to local housing allowance (LHA) – a benefit intended to help tenants meet the cost of private rents – have contributed to the crisis, the report said. LHA support has fallen behind rent levels in many areas, forcing tenants to cover an average rent shortfall of £50 a week in London and £26 a week elsewhere.
by Bob Graham
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