We at the 999 Club were shocked by the statements made on Saturday by Home Secretary Suella Braverman in which she described rough sleeping as a “lifestyle choice”.
We work with people sleeping rough on a daily basis and are therefore all too familiar with the pattern of events which lead to a person sleeping rough. Our data tells us that rough sleeping is rarely a choice but rather that the opposite is normally true; that rough sleeping tends to occur only when an individual has run out of options entirely.
In our experience the incidence of rough sleeping tends to correlate with the failure of social support healthcare systems and unaffordable housing. While those failures may well be the result of choices made at a governmental level, they have certainly not been chosen by our rough sleeping clients.
We’ve seen a near 60% increase in people needing help from our services here in Lewisham since the cost-of-living crisis tightened its grip over the past year. In our opinion it would be an odd coincidence if so many more people had decided to choose rough sleeping during this economic downturn.
Organisations like ours are already struggling to keep up with the increased demand on our services and meet the increased costs to run them at the peak of a housing crisis. The Home Secretary’s threats to criminalise charities and rough sleepers for using tents to survive life on the streets could not have come at a worse time.
We would like to reassure our clients, our funders and our local community that these comments have only strengthened our resolve to do everything we can to help people survive both the winter and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
If the home secretary would be interested to visit us our services and speak to some our rough sleeping clients about the events that led them to that point, we’d be more than happy to arrange this.
Tom Neumark, CEO, 999 Club