When you live in a nice warm home, have a good job and are able to enjoy the finer things in life it is easy and possibly convenient for us to forget that thousands of people up and down the country do not enjoy these luxuries. It would be so easy to cast it from our minds but Britain is a rich country and Shelter released figures that should embarrass us all. In what Shelter say is a conservative figure over 250,000 people can be described as homeless in the UK with up to 3500 people sleeping rough every night. In 2015 nearly half of the people in homeless accommodation were aged between 16 and 24 years of age which is truly shocking and should be shameful to the Conservative Government.

In what has been a perfect storm of rising rents, cuts to mental health services, a housing crisis, more people using food banks than ever and the increasing cost of living homelessness is spiralling out of control. Theresa May’s Government has already said they do not recognise the figures and have claimed that they are investing £500 million into dealing with the homeless crisis and protecting services for the most vulnerable. But this is a drop in the ocean compared to the perfect storm that has been unleashed in austerity Britain.

Britain is the 5th richest country in the world with a nominal GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of £2.8 trillion and yet you can walk down any street in my home city of Manchester and see people with sleeping bags outside of major shops on a daily basis. The situation in Manchester is bad with Shelter estimating that 1 in 266 can be described as homeless. The situation is even worse in London with the certain areas in the centre being closer to 1 in 25. One has to question how the Government can justify spending £370 million on renovating Buckingham Palace (please do not think of me as an anti Royalist by any stretch) when there are thousands of people who have just a sleeping bag and the concrete to sleep on.

In the Autumn Statement Philip Hammond promised an extra £1.4 billion for housing in England which could be used to build 40,000 new homes. These houses are said to be affordable but I really have to question how these are affordable when a person living in London can expect to spend half of their monthly incomes on rental costs. That is for someone who has a job, how does someone who is homeless or doesn’t have a fixed address expect to come up with the money to even get onto the housing ladder when a 3 bedroom house for example can cost over £2000 a month?

Today it seems that charities are having to pick up more of the pieces more than ever. With people who are homeless more likely to suffer from severe health problems, alcoholism and drug addiction charities are inundated as the Government continues to fail on this issue. Recently rough sleepers have died in both Manchester and Birmingham, there has been no mass outcry over this. What are local authorities currently doing? Or with constant funding cuts what are they able to do to protect the most vulnerable in society?

Theresa May recently spoke of having sleepless nights and letting her faith guide her on Brexit. I wonder how her religious convictions are informing her views on people who don’t have a house to sleep in. I have to wonder if she actually cares at all when it is a Government that she was part of that has cut housing benefits to the poorest people in society. Once again the youngest people bare the brunt as housing benefits are cut for 18 – 21s when under 25 year old’s make up a third of homeless people. I would like to know what the Prime Minister intends to do to actually help these people. Clearly another spate of cuts is not helping.

Affordable house building is a good thing and we should support it but more needs to be done to help the truly vulnerable in society. A person who has slept on the streets for years and has a heroin addiction needs more than kind words. A person in that situation needs a society where it isn’t just charities supporting these people. The most vulnerable in society or those on the verge of being on the streets do not need more cuts or do not need to be considered as scroungers. Theresa May talked about making society work for everyone, not just those at the top. She now needs to prove the point and go to the very bottom of society and start from the ground up. I cannot express how unacceptable it is for a country such as Britain to have such huge numbers of people ending up on the streets!

References

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/04/rough-sleeper-numbers-homeless

http://www.homeless.org.uk/facts/our-research/young-and-homeless-research

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-38157410