OPINION: Homelessness: J’accuse

Homeless person

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” (Falsely attributed to Samuel Johnson)

The Interim report on Homelessness from Housing Quality Network makes for depressing reading.

The council cuts of last year not only completely failed to deal with the then, current situation but also completely missed the obvious point that future demand was not only likely to increase, it was wholly inevitable.

Yes, we have listened to our whinging council bleating about the cuts being forced on them by the government but that is only partly true. Yes, the cuts are both deep and severe but Messrs Cameron and Clegg didn’t hold our council leader’s hand and tell him where to wield the axe.

We hear continually that those councillors and officials involved in the Strategic Homelessness Review are men and women of good heart who seriously care about the problem and are keen to put it right. They may well be but as Samuel Johnson didn’t say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It isn’t the caring or the talking that will address this issue, it is the practical application that is needed; preferably backed up with some hard coin of the realm.

I am not interested in what RMBC intends to do. I am interested in what it has done and what has been achieved... which thus far seems precious little.

One thing in the report that has had the Hardcastle hackles twitching with incredulity and disbelief is that the fact that eight months into the Strategic Review, the council cannot say who has applied for, received or been refused support. This makes any pretence of cogent, joined-up service planning little more than guesswork.

As for the idea of pulling hostel funding and putting people up in B&B accommodation, my keyboard threatens to short-circuit as I struggle to come up with a response. It has been a disaster. Who came up with the idea of putting people with multiple problems into B&B accommodation in Burnley or Manchester where they would be far distant from any of the additional support they need?

Well I tell you, sympathetic though I am to the plight of our homeless, if I were the owner of a B&B; I wouldn’t exactly be jumping for joy at the opportunity to play a leading role in housing the borough’s poor and destitute... setting aside for one moment those potential guests with additional dependency and mental health issues, whose effect on my more regular trade might be more than just a tad unsettling.
We know, of course, that homelessness is a national issue set to be made much worse than ill-thought out changes to the welfare system including entitlement to Housing Benefit and the onset of Universal Credit.

Yes, like many of the rest of the population, I think that there is room for an overhaul and an emphasis on some sort of incentives for those of us who choose or who are able to work. However, I am also very well aware that there are not enough jobs to go round and that many of those that set at on National Minimum Wage so that the post-holders are forced to use additional support from the tax and welfare system in order to make ends meet.

So what is Rochdale’s answer? Well, only today I heard on a chat forum of a local woman in social housing aged 90 and suffering from Alzheimers, being threatened with eviction from her one-bedroom flat for arrears of £103!

I suppose, in the end, it comes down to what sort of town we want to live in and what type of a society we wish to be a part of. At the moment, all Rochdale seems to offer is a vision of state-of –the-art trams, gleaming but untenanted shopping centres, splendid vistas across the newly-reopened river populated in increasingly worrying proportion by a people with no jobs, no homes and, worst of all, no hope for the future.

As far as the media are concerned, those of us who work in it are heartily sick of the various movers and shakers in our town whispering in our ears about concentrating more on the good news.

We’d love to but the Interim Report spells out in the very clearest terms that unless there is a change of heart and a change of direction, for many of our citizens, many of whom are currently enjoying the comforts of hearth and home; good news will be in increasingly short supply in the coming years.