WELFARE STATE

Housing

Homeless single people

Frank Field

The numbers of both young and old single homeless people have increased dramatically over the last few years. With growing unemployment, more and more young people, particularly from Glasgow, have made for London in the hope of finding work and lodgings, but many have been unlucky on both counts. And with the closure of government reception centres (the place of last resort) an army of dossers have also found their way to the metropolis. Here they have joined the growing number of ex-mental patients who, once released from hospital, have found that the concept of community care amounts to little more than the printed text in the 1959 Mental Health Act.

Both dossers and ex-mental patients, together with itinerant workers, compete for the cheap overnight accommodation Provided by the rapidly declining number of common lodging houses. In London, a total of 6,405 beds has now fallen over the last decade to a fraction over 4,700, and this trend is reflected elsewhere. For example, Christian Action estimates that the number of common lodging house beds in Birmingham its now 485 compared with 807 in 1960.

This situation looks like deteriorating still I further. Rowton Hotels, who have supplied so much of the capital's cheap accommodation for single men, have just Closed their 750 bed Butterwick House in Hammersmith. Although Rowton Hotels Still provide 2,180 beds in London, this is less than half of what was offered to London's working men a decade ago. A hostel at Colnbrook (just outside Slough), which housed 290 men, is in the process of being Closed, and common lodging houses in Nottingham and Sheffield look like putting up the shutters in the next month or two. RePorts also tell of possible closures as far afield as Edinburgh, Glasgow and LiverPool.

On top of all this comes news from south of the Thames. Southwark, which houses one sixth of all London's lodging houses, Will embark on a massive redevelopment Within the next year or so, and many of these cheap overnight beds will be lost in the rush to erect yet more office blocks and luxury hotels.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the number of men and women sleeping rough 9h the streets of our major towns and cities is increasing. Volunteers working with Christian Action and Outset undertook a snap survey in the middle of June to find the numbers sleeping out in central London: 298 men and women were found sleeping at the main-line stations, the Embankment, in Covent Garden, Spitalfields and Hammersmith Broadway. This total represents over a 400 per cent increase on ten years ago, and is a greater number than was found by the Government's own survey in 1965. Yet neither Christian Action nor Outset aimed to make their efforts as comprehensive as the Government's. There were not enough volunteers to search every likely street. More important, no attempt was made to search derelict buildings. As the 1965 survey found only a small minority of its total actually sleeping on the streets, this year's count of nearly 300 must be taken as the very tip of the large, homeless single persons iceberg.

One particularly disturbing finding from the snap survey was that thirty-eight men sleeping on London's pavements said that they had recently lived in Butterwick House in Hammersmith. Again, this is an understatement of the true number. Only those dossers who were awake were questioned, and some areas likely to have ex-Butterwick residents could not be included in the survey.

The plight of the young single homeless person is probably more desperate. In May 1971, New Horizon, Release, and a couple of other organisations, carried out a census of the numbers of young homeless individuals who were seeking overnight accommodation. In one month ,the half-dozen voluntary bodies received inquiries from 1,760 individuals, and this total excluded tourists, as well as, of course, those who failed to make contact with any of the participating organisations. So again this total IS more a pointer to the real number of homeless. Indeed, Centre Point, an emergency service for homeless youths, shelters 3,000 a year but, because of pressure on beds, limits each individual's stay to only three nights. This lack of accommodation has forced many young people to inhabit derelict buildings, whose owners have long since left, but which are as yet untouched by the bulldozer. Youth workers report that some of these buildings in central London house up to a hundred of what would otherwise be homeless young people. Here, in accommodation which lacks any sanitation or basic services, numerous youngsters are attempting to build a home for themselves.

The need for a crash policy to deal with this growing aspect of homelessness daily becomes more urgent. And if such a policy is to be effective, it will need to include the following suggestions.

First, the rapid decline of lodging house beds must be halted. A policy declaration by the Secretary of State for the Environment committing himself to look critically at all redevelopment plans which entail the closure of lodging houses would go a long way in achieving this. The aim must be for any beds lost, as the property companies and councils hungrily tear down twilight areas, to be replaced in the new development.

By itself this will not be enough. Common lodging house beds are not only being lost through redevelopment but, in London, by change of use. Rowton Hotels Ltd have, over the past decade, ' upgraded ' a number of their properties which now cater for tourists instead of dossers. If the last remaining 2,000 Rowton beds are put to other purposes, any government plans to aid homeless single people will be 'blown off course ', A second commitment is therefore required from the Government, namely, to purchase compulsorily any of the remaining Rowton Houses as and when the company declares its interest in upgrading them into plush hotels.

Next comes the need to establish a reception centre in London for young destitute people. The centre at Camberwell has such a bad reputation (" It's so full of bleeding lice that there's hardly room for anyone" was one recent description of it) that dossers prefer to sleep outside rather than gain admittance. And yet there is the need for a receiving agency that provides immediate accommodation for young people as they flock into the capital.

This leads directly to the provision of somewhere to send people after their short stay in a reception centre. A number of new, small hotels need to he established, and quickly. This is clearly a Central Administration responsibility, for local authorities have shown themselves unwilling to provide this kind of accommodation, and the resources needed far exceed those available to voluntary bodies.

These four short-term reforms are urgent. The need for more information on the numbers of homeless single people does not preclude taking immediate action. Likewise, the need to work out a policy financially compensating those local authorities which house large numbers of potentially homeless single people must start now, as well as encouraging the expansion of voluntary efforts in this field. But again it should not blind us to the need for radically improving the situation of those who, tonight, are forced to sleep out in disused buildings, or on the streets of our big cities.