ANOTHER VOICE

Heartbreaking expense of municipal bed and breakfast

AUBERON WAUGH

They wash in the usually cold water of the room's small sink, piled high with dirty plates,' wrote John Merritt in the Observer recently, describing the plight of Sonia Blackman and her year-old son, Keiran, in one of Brent Council's approved bed and breakfast hotels for the homeless. Sonia Blackman was shown in a photograph across five columns, a handsome, sad-eyed woman — possibly South Sudanese, Ethio- pian, or from the north of Uganda, certain- ly what used to be called Nilotic. Her son, Keiran, by contrast was a well-developed one-year-old who might have been of Irish-Jamaican, West African or almost any sub-Saharan Bantu strain. One won- dered what combination of circumstances had brought this couple to Mr Youmis Rasool's bed and breakfast establishment in Earl's Court, called the Ramsees Hotel, where rain pours through the broken win- dow, at a cost of £180 a week to the ratepayers of Brent. Mr Merritt does not tell us.

But I also wondered, it must be admit- ted, why exactly the room's small sink was always piled high with dirty plates when they chose to wash in it. Might it not have been a good idea to wash the dirty plates first?

Sonia and Keiran have apparently lived in Room 209 of the Ramsees Hotel for eight months. Their council expects them to be there two years from now:

She and Keiran eat take-away and watch the portable television. 'There's nothing else to do, and the kitchen is useless, filthy, and full of flies,' she says.

We are supposed to say that it is a crying scandal that Sonia Blackman and her son Keiran are not immediately given their own council accommodation, where they can resume their vigil over the portable television set without the discomforts listed by Mr Merritt under his headline: `No Hope for Homeless in "Heartbreak Hotels" ':

* shared gas rings as a cooking facility * shared shower and toilets without lights, without flushes, with blocked drains and excrement on the floor * vermin * inadequate hot water

It is unbearably painful to contemplate such privation in an age when we are nearly all so much richer than we have ever been before, when money is sloshing around and bank managers are pushing the stuff at any teenager who lopes into the office. There must be some moral obliga- tion, surely, to say that it is a scandal, and that councils should spend more money on providing. new council housing. The very least we can do is to feel indignant.

I am not sure. Perhaps indignation of this sort is just another emotional luxury to add to all the enjoyable sensations avail- able to us in the modern world. Perhaps we just need something — anything — to feel indignant about. Of all the agonising de- scriptions of the plight of the homeless which I have read, none — with the single exception of the fictionalised television play Cathy Come Home — offers any explanation of exactly why or how these people come to be homeless: what their situation was before they were homeless, and why it changed.

If we disregard the nationwide 'esti- mated' figure of 30,000 people 'now forced into cramped bed and breakfast rooms' (`The number is expected to reach 200,000 single people and families by this time next year') as hopelessly pilgerish and stochas- tic, we are left with the figures for Greater London, which claim, at least, to be more scientific. A responsible newspaper like the Observer would obviously take the trouble to check its figures with the appropriate local authorities. Perhaps be- cause of this, I find that Mr Merritt obviously through no fault of his own has been obliged to produce figures which are not only gobbledygook in themselves, but make nonsense of the central argu- ment, that it is cheaper to build new council houses than it is to provide bed and breakfast accommodation.

First the gobbledygook. Hammersmith and Fulham, we are told, has 634 house- holds or people living in bed and breakfast at a projected cost to the council of £1.9 million. This works out at £2,997 per annum or £57 a week per household. In Tower Hamlets, by contrast, 654 homeless are accommodated in this way at a pro- jected cost of £18 million. This works out at £27,523 or £529 a week per household. Between these two ext-emes, the other London boroughs are more or less evenly spaced. Thus, bed and breakfast in Hack- ney costs £340 a week per household; in Haringey £60.50; in Camden £320.50; in Hounslow £81.80; in Westminster £256; in Kensington and Chelsea £147; in Brent £213; and so on.

From these grotesque disparities, we are told that the average cost of a 'hotel' room used by a London council is £10,920 a year or £210 a week — plainly a meaningless figure. Next we are given to understand that this is more expensive than building a new council house: 'The first-year cost of building a new council house in Greater London is £7,000.'

I do not know what is meant by 'first- year cost' — the interest on the loan, perhaps? — but we all know perfectly well you cannot so much as add a bathroom for that sum nowadays, let alone build a new house or flat. Yet somehow this bland statement has convinced nearly everyone that building new houses is cheaper than B & B accommodation.

The number of would-be households living in B & Bs in Greater London is given as 8,000. In almost the same paragraph we learn of 10,000 council homes in London which have been vacant for over a year. If these figures are right, there would appear to be no immediate need to build any new council houses at all.

Finally, we are told that an extra 300 homeless people are being placed in Lon- don hotels every month, and council wel- fare services can no longer cope. But where are these people coming from and why are they suddenly homeless? Are they simply landing at Heathrow with one-way tickets? If so, they have no claim to have council houses built for them, and it would be insane to do so. Have they been evicted from other council housing for refusing to pay their rent? If so, and in an age when those on supplementary benefit have their rent paid for them, there can be no good reason for putting them into new or better council housing. It is a good and healthy thing to feel pity for these people. Pilgerish indignation on their behalf is neither one thing nor the other. But I can't help feeling that the Youmis Rasools of this world would bring down their prices if they were faced with a compulsory purchase order.