If, like me, you’re wondering why it took a global pandemic for some people in government and local authorities to go,
‘Hey, you know what would be a good idea? ‘
‘What?’
‘You know these people experiencing homelessness?’
‘Uhuh’
‘How about if we get them into a warm room, make them comfortable, sheltered, get them kind of healthy and acclimatised and welcome and cared for. ‘
‘Yeah… ‘
‘And then find them permanent housing!’
‘Good God. What a revelation. You’ve cracked it.’
It’s a light bulb moment, isn’t it? One of the kind of light bulb moments that you think people must be as thick as two short planks. But there we are
So you’ve got to wonder, why did it take 60 years?
‘Why 60’ I hear you say.
Well, Ken Loach made a film called ‘Cathy Come Home’ in the late 60s. [One minute into audio Ken Loach corrected from Mike Leigh*]. This showed a family, decent, hard working family, plunge into chaos and mayhem and become homeless. This made Britain incensed. We’re a civilised nation.
‘We are decent human beings, here, we are. How can there be homeless people in the British Isles?’
And out of that spawned Shelter, Crisis, St Mungo’s, St Martins and a plethora of other charities going,
‘no, no, no.’
And whilst I’m I’m sure their intent was in the right place, the problem was, is they went,
‘this doesn’t happen that often. If it was systemic, the government would get involved, but clearly there aren’t enough people who are in this situation in Britain for the government to get involved, and it’s only right that charities fill in that gap’
Move forward 10 years to the 1970s. Britain is an entirely different country. Rebellion is in the air, punk rock is on the radio, and frankly we’re just about to come in to the self-centred decade. The unions have caused Britain to come to a grinding halt. Which means people are kind of done with left wing societal politics. Enter Margaret Thatcher. Monetarist.
‘If you work hard, you shall be rewarded’ came the mantra.
‘Huh’, came the retort, and so we created a generation that went,
‘if you haven’t got something, it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough. It’s because you didn’t try hard enough.’
It is, in fact, the great religious mantra,
‘Believe in God and he shall heal all your wounds and if he doesn’t, that’s your own stupid fault for not believing hard enough.’
90s things are going to get weird. 90s is kind of a decade without much to say about itself other than the disaster that was Tony Blair. Blair came in and went,
‘ah, ah, no, no, charities, charities must be run like businesses, bring in business adviser type people. Let’s have them looking at the business angle of them. Let’s have them generating money and to help them, let’s subcontract them to the government.’
Now, a sensible, bright human being as I was.
‘What now?’ Are you telling me that these things are significant enough in the British population for you to fund a charity rather than be a government and take on the responsibility yourself?
And it was like,
‘ah ah ah but look Paul, this is genius. We give the charity the responsibility to end the problem, if they don’t, that’s their fault.’
No more come back on politics. Oh, that does not sound good. And so the decades past. And here we are in 2021.
Last year, the pandemic finally woke up people to go,
‘you know, we’ve got all of this infrastructure and charities and we’re spending billions, literally billions on research, do we ever ask any of these people experiencing homelessness what we could do to help them get out of this situation? ‘
‘Yes, Paul, we did. We did.’
‘Oh, good. What did we do? ‘
‘Well, we have this piece of research in the city of London and we said we are going to give money to people [experiencing homelessness]… And they can ask us for any amount of money and we’re going to see how that impacts on them.’
‘Wow. That sounds like a a daring piece of exercise.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘They didn’t ask for anything like the amount that we had actually available to them. We didn’t tell them how much we had, but they asked us for how much they needed
And what did this do?
It pretty much ended homelessness. There are some people left out for variety of reasons, but the majority have got themselves settled, sorted and organised.’
‘OK, so why do we stop doing that?’
‘Well, because it worked’
‘Uh, what?’
‘Yeah, well, you know, it worked, which meant that we’d lose the whole infrastructure of thousands of people would become unemployed overnight. The homelessness sector would disappear overnight. Well, we didn’t want that, clearly. Oh, and by the way, homeless people are there to remind other people that they’ve got to work hard. Otherwise they may be thinking, well, I won’t starve to death if I don’t do this slave labour job. And where would that lead us – some kind of unity, fairness and equity and who the hell wants that?”
And so I’m writing a blog for the RSA having to try and explain 60 years worth of homeless history and there’s a bit of me that’s going
‘how have so many people had so many jobs which have paid so much money that not a single one of them had come up with ‘Everyone In’ before.’
And please don’t think this slogan is some kind of panacea, some kind of silver bullet. What it is, is a really good starting point to get people out there and find people in need of a home and give them one. Not hard, not costly, saves way more than you leaving them out. There’ll be health problems, societal problems, demographic problems with …[property] prices dropping, a whole bundle of things that are hugely costly in comparison to just as a state, buying them a bit of land very cheaply, building on it very cheaply, doesn’t mean that the property should be cheap. It just means that you’re not paying market values which are totally and utterly overvalued and insane. And then give it to ’em. No conditions. No hoops to jump through, no stupid anything, make sure they’re paid welfare properly, on time no hoops. And you’re done. Not billions of research, not bridging loans, not I need to give you some form of address because you can’t get assistance. I need to give you some kind of card to go to the doctor so you can register. None of that nonsense.
I mean, seriously, I’m a filmmaker. If we approach this problem in the way we approach making films, we’ll be done in under six hours because we don’t go, oh, how do we get there ,we go where are we going? We’re going to make a film. We’re going to stage a play. We’re going to create a piece of art. That’s our end point. How will we get there is completely irrelevant. How did you find your last production people ask me and I go
“completely and utterly different to the one before that and the one before that and the one before that,”
And it’s that approach and that approach alone that we need if we’re serious about ending homelessness. And until we do take that approach, you can be rest assured that no one is interested in fixing the problem whatsoever.
Cathy Come Home: The TV drama that put homelessness on the map
