“Homelessness doesn’t quite reflect society as a whole, although we have had BBC producers and professional people. The causes of homelessness are incredibly varied. Randomly bad things happen to individuals and some people will have support networks to fall back on and have more options than others. But it will always get worse when unemployment and poverty rises,” he said.
“Our numbers have gone up but we don’t know yet if all the homelessness charities are seeing a similar rise. The problem with this recession is that there are so very few preventative services, so agencies like mine are really the ambulance service. We pick people up rather than catch them on the way down. At the worst, we can even add to the problem rather than solve it by bringing people into a culture of homelessness that it is tremendously difficult to break out of,” he said.
Gripped by that kind of helplessness, construction worker Phil Jacobs cannot see a way off the concrete streets he beds down on as soon as the daytime shift of shop and office workers has gone home. After losing his job, flat and girlfriend in the space of two weeks, he is sharing a regular doorway across from London Covent Garden’s five-star St Martins Lane hotel, with Andy, 26. He earned £24,000 a year as a nightclub manager in northern England. His mother is a psychiatrist and his father a marine engineer. When the club went bust, Andy came to London to look for similar work, but swiftly found himself on the streets as his money ran out and no job materialized.
“I had a good lifestyle. My landlord went under and I had a couple of grand in loans and credit cards and you run out of money. You use up all the favors from your mates and then you can’t go home and it just happens,” he said.
His trainers still look clean and trendy and he is waiting for an interview for a place in a night shelter. Time is still on his side but only just.
For Linda Stout-Turner, the wheels are turning very slowly but she says she is lucky to have a hostel place at all.
“I have only been at St Martin’s for a couple of weeks but already the queues outside are getting longer. The number of new faces is becoming greater. Some will cope and some won’t. I will be OK, I know I will. I will get my own place and then I will look back on all this and see it for the bad dream it is,” she said.
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