'Explain to me why I'm homeless': Rough sleeper's rage tells us a lot about what's keeping people homeless

“I’m still in a state of shock,” Nikolas says. A year ago, Nikolas was in a good job. But then he was laid off. “I couldn’t find anything else, so eventually I ran out of my savings. I was thinking that universal credit would sort me out, but it didn’t,” he says. By the time it got to December, his savings were gone and he was homeless. Now he’s sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff.

Nikolas, a Latvian with a master’s degree, has lived in the UK for more than five years, and in Ireland for 15 years before that. He’s been told he can’t get universal credit, despite passing the test to claim it as recently as a couple of years ago. While sleeping on the streets, his documents and phone got stolen, leaving him unable to find a new job. Drug dealers interrupt his sleep at 2am, asking him if he wants to buy anything.

“Explain to me why the hell I am homeless, rough sleeper, can’t find a job when I’m a skilled professional, well educated,” he says. It looks like his only option might be to take legal action against the council. “It’s insane, to be honest with you. I’m not sure what to do next. I have no documents, no ID.”

Nikolas is speaking in the garden of a day centre known as the Solutions Centre, run by local charity The Wallich, where he comes to do his laundry, have a shower and drink coffee. During the centre’s opening hours of 10am to 3pm, up to 35 people will drop in each day, some simply to get off the streets for a period, others to cook and make use of medical services on offer.

As part of our Big Community Roadshow in Cardiff during May, Big Issue visited The Wallich’s services to investigate the systemic barriers keeping people on the streets. 

Homelessness in Wales reached record levels in 2024, with more than 13,000 households categorised as homeless. The nation mirrors a UK-wide trend, as homelessness rose by 10% in a single year.

This is not a low-stakes game. Tucked just next to Superdrug in Cardiff’s city centre, there is a black cross on a wall. Easy to walk past without noticing, it is surrounded by 34 smaller wooden crosses, each of which bears a handwritten name. “In loving memory to all the homeless who have passed away on our streets of Cardiff”, reads a plaque in their midst.

The average homeless man will die at 47 and the average homeless woman will die at 43 – whereas the average man and woman in the general population can expect to live for 79.5 and 83.1 years respectively. Those are lives cut almost in half.

The Wallich knows of 29 verified rough sleepers in Cardiff, says Dawn Taylor, service manager of the Solutions Centre. Those are people the charity’s teams have actually seen sleeping on the streets. There are a further 15 who have come to the service saying they’re sleeping rough but who have not been verified – forming part of a hidden population.

The city’s rough sleepers fall into a few groups, Taylor explains. Five or so are entrenched, living on the streets as a chosen lifestyle. Then there are three or four who the council actually has a duty to house. But the largest group are those either with no recourse to public funds or no local connection – the hard cases to solve. A decade ago, says Taylor, thoes on the streets tended to be more “traditional” drug users and drinkers. Now it’ll often be people who’ve gone through relationship breakdowns or come to Cardiff from elsewhere in Wales.

It is not just coffee on offer at the Solutions Centre. “What we’re trying to do is make it a one stop shop,” says Taylor. This means a rotating cast of helpers from elsewhere come in: homeless mental health nurses, GPs, a reconnection service for people from other parts of the UK to return home, citizen’s advice, and a housing officer. The housing officer can make instant decisions, cutting through bureaucracy and waiting times that might be faced elsewhere. Rather than going across the city for appointments, queuing at libraries, and worrying about missing phone calls, rough sleepers can get what they need here. “When you remove the barriers, people are more willing to open up and chat and you get to understand more about their story,” says Taylor.

Mental health is one big reason people stay on the streets for a long time, as well as lack of suitable accomodation, with large hostels of up to 70 people often the only option. “The chaos is there. You’re mixing people with different needs, different substance issues. If you’re someone who doesn’t take substances or is in recovery and doesn’t want to be in that environment, where do you go?” says Taylor. “There are some people with severe mental health who really need to be in fully supported single flats, to be honest.” 

For Ronnie, who’s been in and out of homelessness for 24 years, large hostels don’t feel like a safe environment. “I’d rather be on the streets. People are going to leave me alone, instead of going in my pockets while I’m asleep,” he says. “You hear people look after each other. Now these days, everybody’s robbing you.”

You might think the route out of rough sleeping is to just get a job. We’re well past that point. Taylor explains it’s common for hospitality workers to sleep rough. One man who comes to the centre is a bar manager who lost his flat because his lease came to an end. “He’s rough sleeping with his dog,” says Taylor. Another worked in a kitchen in the city but was sleeping in a tent in Bute Park. “We used to open up early for him so he could shower before he started work. Then he’d go and do a shift, and go to a tent, and every night he came back he didn’t know if his tent was going to be there.”

Both faced a common trap for those on the first step out of homelessness. Start working and you’ll lose housing benefits, which makes hostel accommodation unaffordable. “They can’t afford to rent a flat in Cardiff, it’s too expensive, but they want to carry on working, and they can’t go into a hostel. If you’re working and you go into a hostel, you can’t claim for housing benefit and you have to pay for full rent, which is high because you have to pay for the staff as well,” says Taylor. The average rent of a hostel room is £250 a week, compared to around £140 for a room in a shared house. Faced with this choice, explains Taylor, the chef gave up his job to get into hostel accommodation – a step backwards. To complete the circle, those living on the streets often cannot get a job in the first place because they don’t have an address. Where do you begin to rebuild?

Across Cardiff, in a hostel run by the Wallich in the Adamsdown area, the hostel’s service manager Christopher Rees explains it’s currently hard to move people on because of a lack of places to send people. The hostel has 25 rooms, with the only empty space thanks to a recent eviction for drug dealing on the premises. Chanel, one of four women in the hostel, speaks of her boredom. “You can’t work here. The rent’s ridiculously high if you work. It’s like a step resistance, which is sad really. But hopefully I get out of here soon and I can get a job,” she says.

Rees explains a series of bottlenecks, from a lack of social housing to financial pressures, can keep people in the hostel for longer than is ideal. “Sometimes they’ll be coming from previous rented accommodation with the council where they’re got rent arrears. They can’t be considered to move on until we’ve got that”, says Rees.

Residents of the hostel are allowed to use drugs in their room. Staff do daily welfare checks, and naloxone – a drug which reverses opioid overdoses – is available onsite, as well as a needle exchange to reduce cross-contamination. 

For those trying to get off drugs, there is yet another barrier. Substitute treatment, such as methadone for those looking to kick a heroin addiction, is readily available to prison leavers. “Within a week, 10 days, of coming out of prison, you’re on your treatment. Happy days,” says Rees. But the general homeless population can face waiting lists of anywhere from 18 to 24 months. As a result, people will come to Rees and say that if they shoplift and get arrested, it can be a shortcut to treatment. “People actually do that,” he says. “It’s pushing people into criminality. I’m not saying it’s all the NHS’s fault, they’ve got a massive waiting list. But it does seem to people who are not criminals that it’s not fair, and that’s the perception you’ve got to get around.”

The next step for Nikolas is getting to London, going to the Latvian embassy, and sorting a new passport out. “I’m thinking, is it even worth doing that?” he asks. “Am I supposed to beg it up for the travel to London? And what then?”

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