London’s success story with homelessness needs to be taken seriously
By Lethbridge Herald on September 13, 2023.
Editor:
Thank you Lethbridge Herald for the recent series of reporting on homelessness. I especially appreciated the comparison between two opposing views.
I do not have any fresh idea except drawing attention to the article by Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail published on July 22nd. It was about the homeless people in London, England during the late 1980s. We may learn something from a success story.
Saunders recalls the history when he lived there and concludes that the problem in London was “more or less fully solved humanely and comprehensively.”
It is an intriguing story that made me feel positive about the situation that seems hopeless. He began by recalling his time in London a few decades ago. It was the time of what the media termed as “rough sleeping problem people.”
They were the people just like those we refer to as “the homeless” or “drug addicts” in Lethbridge. When Saunders went back to London for another assignment recently, to his astonishment he found “rough sleepers were gone.”
I lived in Switzerland during the 1980’s and went to London often for concerts and stages. We did a lot of shopping too. The economy was so bad in the U.K. that everything was cheaper because of the strength of Swiss franc. There were regular discount charter flights for shoppers to London. The city was full of people in the similar conditions as ours on the street.
They were called “rough sleepers” in the media. It was the sight I had never seen in such a scale in other cities.
I saw them snoring in the pews of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Field in the mid-day. We went to see the rehearsal of the renowned orchestra. It was a free concert if you didn’t mind sitting next to sleeping rough sleepers. How did they all disappeared now when the rest of the world is struggling with homelessness in the cities?
In 1997, Saunders says, the U.K. government created the “Rough Sleeper Unit” (RSU) aiming at reducing the number of people on the streets by two-thirds within three years.
It was a national program. The head of the Unit, Louise Casey, was called “Homeless Czar” with the extraordinary power to cut red tapes in order to achieve the goal. It accomplished the target by not just filling the demands of the shelter operators but also by slashing the supply of rough sleepers.
RSU worked directly with the sources of the street people by following the individuals and helping them to deal with their personal issues. It was a massive operation following the target people individually. That must have taken a lot of human resource from the health, military, and social service sectors.
The reason for the RSU success, Saunders concludes, was the fact that sources of rough sleepers during the 1980’s were powerful institutions such as the military, the penal system, the care-home system, and the institutions dealing with health and addiction.
RSU obliged those systems to ensure that the people who left the institutions would be given places to stay and wouldn’t end up on the street.
Particularly, it shamed two powerful ones and pressured the National government to act to ensure those troubled people were treated properly after they left. Do you remember in Canada too there was a huge outcry a few years ago? “Give homeless veterans a place to live before helping refugees.”
The program was a success but was cancelled not too long after because it was too expensive. Can you imagine the scale and the cost of one-on-one dealing with the rough sleepers?
People with problems come from many different backgrounds. When I observed homelessness in Toronto in 1968, I lived among them for three days pretending to be one of them. I was wearing shabby clothes, sleeping in the shelters and eating at a soup kitchen.
They were mostly white unemployed men then. When I volunteered to serve in the soup kitchen with teenage parishioners in Montreal in 1994-5, we saw many tired looking unshaven middle-class men in their worn-out three piece business suits. They lost everything at the newly opened Casino at the former Expo site. The troubled people vary coming from different sources. One brush stroke can not cover varied situations.
Back to London: “This effort was expensive, therefore was abandoned. But for a decade, it worked: one of the world’s worst “rough-sleeper crisis was all but solved:” Says Saunders.
London has no homeless problem today despite the crisis of massive migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East on leaky boats and containers. In the midst of the world wide crisis of homelessness, it’s time to look at the success story of London seriously.
Saunders concludes, “The problems have solutions, if we have the will.”
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui
Lethbridge
24-23
Agreed…it never hurts to adopt good ideas from others that would apply here. It would be worth a try.
“ London has no homeless problem today”
I am sorry you were misinformed by your source and I having been to London recently witnessed people living rough.
Lethbridge has used federal, provincial and municipa funds, millions recently to deal the with issues and we have seen dramatic change on our streets this year, compared to last year.
“First-time rough sleeping in London up 29% – data”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64496905