Burnham is singing from Big Issue's hymn sheet on rough sleeping. It gives us reason for hope

Last weekend showed the World Cup at its finest. England 6-4 France was the best of best games. As a friend of mine said, why don’t we have a prize for the ‘best game’, not just the best player or team? Certainly the France-England game would have won such a prize hands down. The final was lacking in charm and joy, but the bronze was football as an exciting alternative to stalemate play.  

The day after seven weeks of obsessive football, reality took on a new face; a new government came into being. And astonishingly, Andy Burnham took on rough sleeping as his first priority, a preoccupation that has obsessed our output since the September 1991 creation of the Big Issue. The 35 years of pushing and pushing to rid us of rough sleeping in particular, and homelessness in general, seemed as if it’s paid off.  

But ‘There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip’ springs to mind. ‘It’s easier said than done’ likewise. Hope before delivery, promising the Earth and delivering a flowerpot. etc, etc. All intended to bring us down to reality. Isn’t Burnham promising way more than he could possibly achieve? Didn’t Boris Johnson promise the same in 2019 when he stated that by 2025 he would end homelessness?  

I remember when rough sleeping became an increasing reality. In 1961 as a 15-year-old runaway dodging the police and family, you would not, or could not, sleep rough. You would be arrested. Neither could you beg unless facing the magistrate if caught. Strict vagrancy and ‘No fixed abode’ laws were used liberally. If you were ‘skippering’ as it was variously called, you hid. In derelict or abandoned buildings, away from the public eye; so that you were not carted off to the police cell and on the morrow given perhaps three months inside.  

You might call it street cleansing. If there was the social dislocation called homelessness, it was kept away from scrutiny. But by the mid 1960s something had changed. Begging and public rough sleeping seemed to be ignored by the police. By the end of the 1960s people and the press seemed to take note. Bits of TV appeared about this new sudden phenomenon. Charities were being quickly conjured up to provide food and shelter. Churches were opened up for these new people so that they could at least get a night’s sleep.  

Previously it was the Rowton House, a chain of cheap hotels for the penniless, or the Salvation Army or church army that provided a bed. But now a growth in amateurish but committed groups around churches sprung up.  

What had happened could be put down to the magistrates, who stopped sentencing people for begging and rough sleeping. And therefore the police stopped arresting. Gradually streets in the centre of our cities, principally London, took on a new reality. The dispossessed became visible.  

Read more:

• New prime minister Andy Burnham starts with vow to end rough sleeping. Here’s how he aims to do it
• Andy Burnham: ‘Housing is a human right’
• Rough sleeping a ‘source of national shame’, government told

So what started off as a social cleansing system was allowed to fall apart. The vagrancy laws remained in place from 1824 to only a few weeks ago, but they were used less often. Usually you could wrap yourself up in something and sleep where commerce traded and the public wondered.  

A new ingrained reality became acceptable. A human rights abuse became visible. Now there were people in the streets who had fallen between the cracks of what was largely an all-encompassing social support system. The welfare system developed more holes. The problem was downloaded by the state to the streets and passed onto charities. In other words, from state to public. “You sort it out”, seemed to run the argument from police, local authorities and central government.  

Visible homelessness was given a stiff increase with the Thatcher government. Closing down of industries, mainly in the Midlands and the North, displaced the children of the formerly employed into the streets of London. Rent boys and rent girls brought prostitution to Victorian levels. Then the monumental closing down of our mental institutions and with nothing put in place to support those freed up, street chaos increased.  

Prisons, hospital A&E departments and streets laid bare this new government social contract with the public, as the disturbed were added to the displaced. Social sores were displayed as government washed its hands of responsibility. The grocer’s daughter Thatcher demonstrated her commitment to a kind of American realism where for centuries the wretched were often displayed next to the prosperous. As if it were a living reminder of your need to work hard and be sensible, or you might end up like the ragged person you saw a minute ago curled up in a doorway.  

Every homeless person was a moral Thatcherite lesson that, as a girl, Miss Roberts learned at her father’s knee. A moral philosophy was on display for all to learn in a street near you.  

Burnham prioritises a social injustice and we thank him for that. His opening salvos on former government neglect were so ‘Big Issue-y’ that the press wanted to know my hand in it. I should have played it up and intimated with little smiles that clandestine meetings might have been held between myself and the wizard of the North. But I came clean that even Burnham saying he was going to create a preventative regime was all coming exclusively from him. No late-night phone calls or secret meetings in filling stations on the M1.  

It was good news last Monday. It centres homelessness as a blight on the face of society. There are other blights. The biggest to me is the 40% of governmental income going on maintaining people in poverty. We need a prevention of poverty and cure school of thinking in government and civil service. As of yet the delivery of clear and cogent poverty dismantling thinking has been crap. We live in hope. 

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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