The statistics are bleak: rough sleeper numbers in England rose in 2017 for the seventh consecutive year. The ‘official’ tally – the number of people likely to be out on the streets on any one night – was put at 4,751. But the real figure is likely to be far higher once the ‘hidden homeless’ – people whose homeless situation is concealed by the fact they are squatting or sofa surfing or living in extremely over-crowded accommodation – are factored in.1 On average, a homeless man dies at the age of 47 (for women it’s 43). And they are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. [...]
Personal issues can also play a part. Many rough sleepers have alcohol or drug dependencies or mental illness. They may have fled violence at home. But once on the streets, it’s almost impossible to get off. And the large increase in the number of homeless over time is testament to the power wider societal factors have in pushing people to the margins. It’s no coincidence that there are growing numbers of people bedding down outside at a time of austerity, precarious work and cuts to local authority budgets. [...]
Moreover, three quarters (74%) believe that rough sleepers could get themselves off the streets if they wanted to. In other words, we still view extreme poverty through a lens tinted by the Victorian age, when Henry Mayhew, pioneer of 19th-century social research on the poor, subtitled the fourth volume of his book London Labour and the London poor, “Those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work”. [...]
But it can’t be denied that part of the problem lies in the public’s attitude. A widespread indifference has allowed the crisis to reach this point. If the homeless are lucky, we step over them. If they aren’t, they are belittled, assaulted and urinated upon. Until they are seen as less fortunate versions of ourselves, people who unintentionally ended up at the margins of society, then Gary and the thousands of people like him will remain a faceless statistic, the unwanted detritus of an atomised society.
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