£100 million investment

The Government is planning to invest £100 million to end rough sleeping by 2027 throughout England. The Rough Sleepers Initiative, announced in August 2018, aims to help homeless people turn their life around and offer support and help with addictions, mental health and accommodation, writes Jean Hindry.

The money will be solely targeted at rough sleepers. Local authorities will not be able to spend the money elsewhere, for example on refuse collection or lowering the council tax and they will be made accountable. The aim is to unlock more homes, work with charities and councils, find new ways and new initiatives. But it is obvious that we are in for the long haul and cannot eradicate these momentous and sensitive problems overnight.

Ending period poverty

Stevie-Jo Pasing, a 27-year-old homeless woman being interviewed on the Victoria Derbyshire programme on BBC, spoke of her family’s struggle to afford sanitary products. She says the embarrassment she felt over her plight led to skipping class. Research commissioned by the brand Always suggests girls who have experienced period poverty are more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression as women. Previous research conducted on behalf of Always found more than 130,000 girls had missed school due to period poverty.

• Find free pads/tampons for school students across the UK via Facebook groups on www.redboxproject.org.
•  The Tricky Period and Bloody Good Period also provide free pads, see their websites – www.cilip.org.uk/page/TrickyPeriod and www.bloodygoodperiod.com. Also try asking if your local library stocks free items.

All talk

Through a freedom of information request, Inside Housing magazine has learned that local authorities in England have increased spending on temporary accommodation for homeless families by 56 per cent in five years.

Local authorities now spend about £1billion a year on temporary accommodation. Meanwhile, Private Eye says welfare reforms have increased the number of homeless people, stating that: “measures such as Universal Credit, the bedroom tax, benefit cap and benefit freeze amount to a homeless creation policy.”

Botched proposal

Nottingham City council has been forced to defend its plans to tackle anti-social behaviour. According to the Huffington Post, it will ban people from asking for money, personal items or other donations by implementing Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPO). PSPOs have been controversial across England since their pilot in 2014. They allow councils to create a framework intended to curb antisocial behaviour. However, human rights advocacy group Liberty has accused the council of trying to “airbrush their streets”.

Sleep out season

Youth homelessness charity Rock Trust held its 25th annual sleep out in October. The charity raised over £65,000 in 2017, and asks each participant to aim to fundraise £250 for the sleep out. This year the fundraiser was held in St Andrew Square in central Edinburgh. Rock Trust’s website says the charity houses 400 young people a year, and will use the sleep out’s raised funds to keep the doors open to young rough sleepers, and invest in projects to help fight homelessness.

Glasgow rethink

Glasgow city council aims to form an alliance designed to tackle homelessness, in what they call a “UK first”. The council is currently recruiting partners to join the project, and will work with them for between seven and 10 years on various schemes submitted by the partners. The alliance’s key aim will be to reduce the time spent by people in homelessness services, and to provide homeless people with an easier route to mainstream tenancies. It also looks set to involve many people with first-hand experience of homelessness, reports Glasgow live.

New charity voice

With One Voice, the international arts and homeless movement founded by Streetwise Opera is due to become an independent charity from 1 April 2019. This November With One Voice will host a four-day summit and week-long festival in Manchester, with more than 250 delegates from 15 countries. Half of the summit’s delegate places will be given free to people who are or have been homeless. Info at www.withone-voice.com/summit-festival

Tip of the iceberg

In October at the launch of Only A Pavement Away (see pic), Minister for Housing & Homelessness, Heather Wheeler MP announced a new fund to make £20 million available for schemes that provide those who are homeless or sleeping rough with better access to sustainable tenancies. She said: “We know that rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg. To break the cycle of homelessness, we have to tackle the underlying issues – and that has to begin with housing.”

Veteran support

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan opened the newly remodelled New Belvedere House in September. The residential facility aims to help veterans of the armed services off the streets and get them into housing. Veterans Aid, a charity for rough sleeping veterans, created and runs the project which can house 66 people. The Mayor’s office says City Hall provided £1.6m to assist the refurbishment. Khan told those attending the opening “it is completely unacceptable that anyone in London, including veterans of our armed services, should have to sleep rough.”

Taxing the 1%

Prime Minister Theresa May has a novel way of tackling homelessness. Foreign property buyers will pay an extra tax of between 1% and 3%, as well as stamp duty, in a move that is also hoped to halt rising UK house prices. May told Andrew Marr on his BBC show that all the money raised by the tax will go towards tackling rough sleeping. Housing charity Shelter was dismissive of the plan, arguing that more social housing had to be built to relieve the homelessness crisis.

Data mishandled

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), a government watchdog, has said “it appears likely” that the charity St Mungo’s provided the personal information about migrant rough sleepers to the Government. St Mungo’s has long denied its outreach team assisted the Home Office enforcement teams, but the Guardian reports that Public Interest Law Unit (PILU) filed a complaint against the charity, leading to the watchdog’s investigation. PILU says this information was handed over without the rough sleepers’ consent, and ICO believes this to be “feasible”. • The Home Office had to stop their strict policy towards migrant rough sleepers after the High Court ruled it unlawful.

Street clean swap

For the past year homeless residents of Fort Worth, Texas, have been given jobs in an effort to combat homelessness. American media company ATTN: shared a video on Facebook showing how the city has hired homeless people to clean the streets for US$10 an hour, plus temporary accommodation. According to officials it has already had positive results, with almost 4,000 tons of garbage collected in a year. “This is the way to fix a lot of the homeless issues in 2018 and beyond,” said Brandon Bennett, one of the Clean Slate Scheme team.

Art sale

Creative people from all walks of life, including those impacted by homelessness, are donating their artworks for the Bad Behaviour December exhibition.

“As well as raising money for the Pavement and St Mungo’s the art show aims to encourage visitors and participants to look more closely at an issue that people all too often turn away from. It will feature some art pieces that question stereotypes about homelessness, also creating a space where homeless people are not only visible, but also creative and relevant,” says organiser Araba Ocran.

• www.badbehaviour.london

Call it a hate crime

Liverpool’s Mayor, Joe Anderson, has asked Home Secretary Sajid Javid to make attacks on rough sleepers a hate crime. In a Crisis report from 2016 nearly a third of rough sleepers surveyed said they had been deliberately hit. Around 45% had been intimidated and 7% had been urinated on.

‘Arts’ can refer to anything from visual arts, to poetry, to choir singing. The thing that binds all of these creative activities together is the positive impact that participating in them can have. Participating in, or contributing to, creative projects has been shown to reduce social isolation, help build social networks, increase physical and mental health and provide a powerful platform for self expression.

It’s not surprising that joining in arts and music projects is becoming more and more popular among homeless people seeking for ways to express themselves.


The Summit and Festival

The Manchester Festival & Summit aims to showcase existing examples of how art activities can positively impact the lives of homeless people, facilitate networking between like-minded organisations and to promote positive perceptions of homelessness to the public.


On Saturday, the Summit will open its doors to the public allowing anyone to attend and contribute, whilst over 40 free entertainment events in venues and on the street across Greater Manchester. The Summit and Festival will both draw to a close on Sunday 18th, finishing with a performance of Man on Bench Fairytale, a play by formerly homeless multimedia artist, David Tovey.

• 50% of Summit delegate places are being given free to people who are currently, or formerly homeless.
• If you are interested and able to attend please visit the With One Voice website for more information, or contact Lora Krasteva (lora@with-one-voice.com)

As our heatwave summer draws to a rainy conclusion, an ever growing team of campaigners across the UK are working hard to make a positive impact through music.

Musicians Against Homelessness (MAH) was launched by music mogul Alan McGee in 2016, and both raises awareness of, and fundraises for, the homelessness crisis in the UK. The organisation is run by volunteers, and all profits from the events go towards supporting charities like Crisis and Simon Community Scotland.

On Saturday 29th September Glasgow’s iconic Barrowland Ballroom will host the UK’s biggest MAH concert of 2018. Supported by an incredible line up from the Scottish music scene including Scottish ska legends Bombskare, Mickey 9s, rapper-come-Orwell Prize winning author Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey and Becci Wallace, The Hollows, Jackal Trades, Dead Man Fall, Steg G and The Freestyle Master and Colonel Mustard & The Dijon 5’s Mark ‘DJ5’ Lang.

Chief Executive of Crisis, Jon Sparkes, said: “I am delighted that Musicians Against Homelessness will be supporting Crisis again this year with what promises to be an even bigger and better programme of gigs and events in the autumn. Homelessness remains an unsolved problem across the UK so their help and support, in what will be our 50th year, is much needed and greatly appreciated.”

Tickets are £10 + booking fee and available in person from Tickets Scotland and online from Skiddle (website link).

MAH Glasgow Facebook event available here.


Who are Musicians Against Homelessness?

Musicians Against Homelessness encourages event promoters, venues and recording artists in every city, town and village in the UK to organise events unified under the shared goal of tackling homelessness. Since 2016, over 1,000 bands have played almost 250 gigs for the movement and earlier this year, MAH formed partnerships with Foodies Festival and the Celeb Soccer Six football tournament to expand their impact.

The grass-roots movement has successfully raised over £100,000 to date, and will support two whole months’ of fundraising gigs across the UK throughout September and October this year. The movement has been grabbing the attention of hundreds of bands, musicians and  celebrities including Liam Gallagher, Shaun Ryder, Russel Brand and Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.

Earlier this year alt-rock legends, James, recorded a new version of their 1989 hit ‘Sit Down’ with a string quartet at the Albert Hall in Manchester, complete with a new music video, to bring attention to the cause.

James frontman Tim Booth said, “Sit down is a song about empathy so we are really honoured and happy that this beautiful version … is being used to raise money for the homeless. We seem to be living in times of increasing inequality where all the safety nets that my generation took for granted have been taken away.”


Find a gig near you!

The Musicians Against Homelessness campaign supports hundreds of concerts across the UK. Visit www.facebook.com/mahgigs to find a gig near you!