As the cost of living goes up and the government continue to hike up prices as if it was a World Cup final, unwittingly they’re hiking up the cost of supporting and tackling the homeless crisis we’re facing. Surely with all the price rises there would be bigger pools of funding to aid the struggle volunteers go through trying to do their bit and help give homeless people the essentials to survive.

It’s clear to say the homeless issue in the UK is a situation the government is struggling to tackle, which makes things like soup kitchens, foodbanks, outreach work, and so on, a bare essential in combating an ever-growing crisis.

I will try to explain the lack of support and safety measures for the sorts of people that go about their day-to-day jobs and then give an hour of their free time to feed people experiencing homelessness or do a street count at 6am on a cold frost-bitten winters morning.

There’s a local soup kitchen in our town-centre every Monday night. I say soup kitchen but it’s just a few tables, a small team of women and one male (who’s a gentle fella) and they work solely off donations. They each take it in turns to cook a big, huge pot of something like a stew or a curry or a casserole.

They have a WhatsApp group so they can plan and communicate between themselves how each Monday night session will work-out. Each person in the group constantly (or as much as time allows) searches through social media for people gifting useful things. They’ve came up with the idea to sell some of the backlog of clothes donations on an app called Vinted to put funds back into buying more functional things such hats, scarves and gloves.

I’ve been getting to know this small team over the past two maybe three months and it’s clear to the lack of everything they need to do what they do. There’s no real safety measures in place for them compared to a soup kitchen based in a church or other building. I’ve been to a soup kitchen in another city that’s ran by a Sikh temple, and they’ve had people from their families and local community that are SIA (Security Industry Authority) registered helping by doing their jobs as security guards.

My local soup kitchen’s smaller team of volunteers has nothing like this and are quite open to any sorts of incidents. Over the past few months, I’ve seen it all go a bit downhill yet this team keeps fighting and doing what they do. There’s been incidents of drunken abuse, volunteers’ phones being stolen and arguments over a lot of minor things.

Last week was the only time in two to three weeks that a police officer had a regular presence, even this didn’t stop a barrage of abuse from a drunk person.

Something really needs to be done to support the smaller groups of ordinary nine to five people that are making more of dent in the homeless crisis than any politician.