‘I thought I’d be dead by now’ – can Labour use Blair template to cut ‘shameful’ levels of rough sleeping?
Ian Harrison watches a film in which, 16 years ago, he is on the streets begging for money in Covent Garden.
Recorded in 2008, we see a fresh-faced 19-year-old Ian, who has been evicted from his flat, telling the camera he is going to take as many drugs as he can get.
“I want to get so far gone, all my problems go away, just for tonight,” he says.
Watching this, 35-year-old Ian blinks slowly.
He nods and lets out a big sigh. Then his teenage self says something prescient: “Nothing changes, only time, and the people I’m begging from.”
Ian nods again: “He is right. Look where I am now!”
Ian is still homeless, his face now wears the years he’s lived on the streets and the addiction to heroin and crack he is still battling.
And although he has a room in a hostel for the moment, his life is on the same cliff-edge it was all those years ago.
It is significant that Ian became homeless in the late 2000s, towards the end of the Blair/Brown era, when a drive to tackle rough sleeping had successfully reduced numbers on the streets by two-thirds and kept them low for a sustained period.
Ian’s been living rough since 2008, when he was still a teenager
He was in a film years ago showing him begging in London
The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn saw homelessness numbers begin to rise, and steadily do so for a decade until a period during the pandemic triggered a drive to get people off the streets.
But now it is peaking again and last year Ian was among 11,993 rough sleepers in London – the highest ever recorded in the capital.
Labour‘s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, described the situation as “shameful” as she took over the task of sorting it out.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner is in charge of tackling the problem. Pic: PA
Ms Rayner will lead a new cross-government taskforce to tackle the issue, which has echoes of Tony Blair‘s cross-department approach.
However, the success of Blair’s rough sleeping unit, launched in 1999, was also attributed to its focus on attempting to tackle the causes of homelessness, not just finding people places to stay.
This is something Ian feels is lacking now.
Despite having a roof over his head, his single room looks like the streets have followed him in.
Ian grew up in care and says he never had anyone to show him the basic things in life
The floor is covered in rubbish, the sink and walls stained, flies buzz around a small boxy space that smells not dissimilar to the cardboard home he lived in under the Hammersmith flyover a few months ago.
Ian grew up in care and says he hasn’t learned how to look after himself.
He says: “I struggle with a lot of basic things in life. I never had parents to say brush your teeth, get in the shower do this, do that, when you grow up into an adult you don’t have that stuff.”
‘Hard to be stable in a place like this’
He is off the drugs and has a prescription for methadone, but says his environment doesn’t help.
“It’s hard to be stable in a place like this, because it’s a very unstable place to be in,” he says.
“If you are picking someone up and putting them in a hostel with 26 other people who are all addicts, it’s not going to take long before it’s going to rub off on you.”
He is in supported accommodation but says it doesn’t offer the support he needs, which is self-care, organisation and, frankly, a great deal of therapy.
No one has ever addressed the root causes of Ian’s problems.
Ian says his supported accommodation is not helping him get better
“From a very young age, you know, I went through a lot of sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, which was sustained daily, for years,” he says.
“They say you need therapy, but to get the therapy you need to be completely clean of drugs and alcohol for a couple of years. But that’s part of the illness, it’s part of the symptoms of the illness.”
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‘Stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years’
It will be the task of Ms Rayner’s cross-department team to try to turn around the lives of people like Ian – and it won’t be cheap.
But the Sky News producer who filmed the footage back in 2008 and has known Ian since that time, has seen him go through countless hostels (around 30, says Ian) and mental institutions, only to eventually end up back out on the streets.
The long-term cost of not solving Ian’s problems is incalculable.
“I’ve been stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years,” he says.
“l become homeless, get into a hostel, become homeless. You give up.”
Asked what his 19-year-old self would have hoped to being doing in his 30s, Ian says: “To be honest, I thought I’d be dead by now. And I wouldn’t have cared if I was.”
But Ian does care now.
A wish list, written on his hostel wall, reads: “Stop using all drugs, save up more cash, care 4 self better, start up business, go to gym, get routine, have camping holiday.”
To achieve this, he is going to need the kind of help that has eluded him all his life.
UK
Changes needed to fix ‘broken system’, as illegal migration ‘creating division across our country’, says home secretary
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has denied that her plans to clamp down on illegal immigration are “racist” – instead describing them as a “moral mission”.
Shabana Mahmood said illegal immigration was causing “huge divides” in the UK, and added: “I do believe we need to act if we are to retain public consent for having an asylum system at all.”
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Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Ms Mahmood said the government would set out changes to the asylum system in a bid to reduce the “pull factor” for those arriving in the UK via small boat.
The home secretary has been looking to Denmark for inspiration, where there are tighter rules on family reunions and restrictions on how long refugees can stay.
Measures that are expected to be announced on Monday include changing the rules so that people who are granted asylum in the UK will only be allowed to stay temporarily, and will have their refugee status subject to regular review.
The statutory legal duty to provide asylum seeker support, including housing and weekly allowances, is expected to be revoked.
Ms Mahmood said such changes were needed to fix the “broken” asylum system.
‘Moral mission’
But asked how she would respond to those who believe the government has been “panicked into a racist immigration policy”, Ms Mahmood said: “I reject that entirely.”
“I am the child of immigrants,” she said. “My parents came to this country legally, in the late 60s and early 70s. This is a moral mission for me.”
Ms Mahmood said she had observed how illegal migration had been “creating division across our country”.
“I can see that it is polarising communities across the country. I can see that it is dividing people and making them estranged from one another. I don’t want to stand back and watch that happen in my country.”
Under current UK rules, people who are granted refugee status have it for five years and can then apply for indefinite leave to remain and get on a route to citizenship.
The government has already announced it will change the rules around indefinite leave to remain with a new set of requirements, including how much someone contributes to the UK and higher English language requirements.
The move to impose tighter restrictions have been interpreted as a way for Labour to counter the threat posed by Nigel Farage and Reform UK, which has laid out plans to deport people who already have ILR – which gives people the right to settle, work and study in the UK and even claim benefits, even if they do not then apply to be British citizens.
Ms Mahmood said that highlighting issues in the system did not amount to making “right-wing talking points or fake news” and that the government had a “genuine problem to fix”.
Although Ms Mahmood is seeking to emulate aspects of the Danish asylum system, she is not copying it in full.
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Inside Europe’s people-smuggling industry
In Denmark, asylum seekers’ access to public housing is restricted in certain areas where there are more than 30% of ethnic minorities, low levels of education and low incomes.
The home secretary said she was not going to “dictate where people live based on percentages”.
Asked if this was one of the measures the UK government may adopt, the home secretary said: “That’s not the sort of country that we are.”
Alongside bringing in measures to mimic Denmark, Ms Mahmood said she would also announce plans to reform the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – aspects of which she said had been used to “frustrate the removal” of those with no right to be in the UK.
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Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said Labour’s plans to reduce immigration were merely a “series of gimmicks” while Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, claimed Ms Mahmood would be blocked from bringing in her plans by her own MPs.
Meanwhile, the SNP have branded the government’s reforms to asylum policy “outrageous”, and have accused Labour of “dancing to Nigel Farage’s tune on immigration”.
The party’s concerns were echoed by the Greens, whose deputy leader Mothin Ali said the furore over the number of people arriving in the UK on small boats was a “very manufactured problem”.
He told Sky News: “To me, it feels like a very manufactured problem. It’s a problem that’s been created to create outrage.”
Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesperson, told Sky News it was “right” that the government was aiming to tackle illegal migration, but said some of the language used had been a “bit uncomfortable”.
Many Labour MPs have been left shellshocked after the chaotic political self-sabotage of the past week.
Bafflement, anger, disappointment, and sheer frustration are all on relatively open display at the circular firing squad which seems to have surrounded the prime minister.
The botched effort to flush out backroom plotters and force Wes Streeting to declare his loyalty ahead of the budget has instead led even previously loyal Starmerites to predict the PM could be forced out of office before the local elections in May.
“We have so many councillors coming up for election across the country,” one says, “and at the moment it looks like they’re going to be wiped out. That’s our base – we just can’t afford to lose them. I like Keir [Starmer] but there’s only a limited window left to turn things around. There’s a real question of urgency.”
Another criticised a “boys club” at No 10 who they claimed have “undermined” the prime minister and “forgotten they’re meant to be serving the British people.”
There’s clearly widespread muttering about what to do next – and even a degree of enviousness at the lack of a regicidal 1922 committee mechanism, as enjoyed by the Tories.
“Leadership speculation is destabilising,” one said. “But there’s really no obvious strategy. Andy Burnham isn’t even an MP. You’d need a stalking horse candidate and we don’t have one. There’s no 1922. It’s very messy.”
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Starmer’s faithfuls are ‘losing faith’
Others are gunning for the chancellor after months of careful pitch-rolling for manifesto-breaching tax rises in the budget were ripped up overnight.
“Her career is toast,” one told me. “Rachel has just lost all credibility. She screwed up on the manifesto. She screwed up on the last two fiscal events, costing the party huge amounts of support and leaving the economy stagnating.
“Having now walked everyone up the mountain of tax rises and made us vote to support them on the opposition day debate two days ago, she’s now worried her job is at risk and has bottled it.
“Talk to any major business or investor and they are holding off investing in the UK until it is clear what the UK’s tax policy is going to be, putting us in a situation where the chancellor is going to have to go through this all over again in six months – which just means no real economic growth for another six months.”
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Why is the economy flatlining?
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After less than 18 months in office, the government is stuck in a political morass largely of its own making.
Treasury sources have belatedly argued that the chancellor’s pre-budget change of heart on income tax is down to better-than-expected economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
That should be a cause of celebration. The question is whether she and the PM are now too damaged to make that case to the country – and rescue their benighted prospects.
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