by Frances Ryan
From the coalition government to Theresa May’s administration, recent years have seen a range of policies brought in that have decimated the housing safety net. The local housing allowance (LHA), introduced in 2008 by the last Labour government to bring the amount being spent on housing benefit for those renting privately in line with the benefit for those renting social housing, was severely tightened under David Cameron, often leading to less housing benefit being paid for the same accommodation. That this was done at a time of increased private rents meant there was often now no link between LHA and what was actually needed to pay the rent, pushing low-income families into mounting arrears.
Meanwhile, the benefit cap, a policy that put a limit on how much a household could receive in social security, made it even harder to pay the rent. First introduced in 2013, the benefit cap epitomized the narrative of the benefit shirker versus the hardworking taxpayer perpetuated by the coalition, harking back to the idea that hordes of benefit claimants were enjoying an easy life compared to workers. As then chancellor George Osborne said in 2012, ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits.’34
The policy was so popular that the government lowered the cap even further in 2016. In doing so, it saw 10,000 additional disabled people have their benefits reduced, often by more than £100 or even £150 a week.35 The Department for Work and Pension’s own research showed that ministers were fully aware that disabled people would be disproportionately hit: ‘of the households who lose from this policy … we expect roughly half will contain somebody who is classed as disabled under the Equality Act,’ it read.36 Because of their disability, these were often people who had no way of moving into work in order to escape the cap. The infamous neighbour ‘sleeping off a life of benefits’ was in fact too sick to get out of bed in the morning.
But it was the bedroom tax that in many ways came to symbolize the worst of such changes; a policy that led to as many as 660,000 people in social housing have their housing benefit docked for having a so-called ‘spare’ room, which saw families lose an average of £728 each year.37 The bedroom tax uniquely targeted disabled people, with almost half of all those affected having a disability.38 Like other so-called welfare reforms, from the offset, a policy that was set to cause incredible harm to disabled people was presented as some sort of moral mission. ‘It’s unfair to subsidise spare rooms in the social sector if you don’t subsidise them in the private sector,’ David Cameron said in the House of Commons in 2016. ‘That is a basic issue of fairness.’39
Look at right-wing newspaper headlines or listen to a government ‘welfare’ minister debate the bedroom tax and the impression is of a disabled person milking the taxpayer to enjoy a spacious guest room. In reality, these were box rooms lined with adult nappies and oxygen cylinders. Many of the ‘spare rooms’ that disabled people had their benefits docked for were in fact being used to store vital medical equipment or for a carer to sleep in. Regardless, the public widely supported it: an opinion poll on the bedroom tax by Ipsos Mori in 2013 found that only a quarter of people were against the policy.40
The result was wheelchair users skipping meals. In 2013, only a few months after the policy was brought in, research by the charity Papworth Trust found that nine in ten disabled people were being forced to cut back on food or paying household bills after being refused emergency housing payments to help them pay the bedroom tax.41 At the same time, Carers UK found that one in six carers interviewed over the first 100 days of the bedroom tax reported that they were facing eviction after falling behind on the rent.42 That’s families caring for loved ones with cancer, or looking after a severely disabled child. It was only after a legal challenge in 2017 that the government was forced to exempt carers from the bedroom tax.43
I asked a manager of a London-based mental health charity if many disabled people came through the service after experiencing homelessness. ‘A lot of people I know have lost their homes due to the bedroom tax,’ she said. ‘Many are now sleeping on other people’s sofas, or in hostels. Others are pet-sitting in other peoples homes, some live in tents, some do DIY work round the country to get a home.’
Even the apparent motivation for the policy – that it would ‘encourage’ social tenants to downsize to smaller properties – penalized disabled people. Freedom of Information requests by the Labour Party in 2013 found that 96 per cent of those affected had, in effect, nowhere to move to; the deficit in one-bed properties in the social housing stock meant that they were trapped in their larger homes even if they wanted to downsize to avoid the tax.44
Worse, many disabled tenants’ homes are heavily adapted properties; wet rooms, grab rails and ramps fitted by their council over the years to help them live independently. It means that the bedroom tax – supposedly another step in bringing the ‘welfare’ bill down – was in effect forcing disabled people to leave behind expensive renovations only to move to a smaller property that would then need adapting all over again. It was another rigged game: in a climate in which it was harder than ever to hold on to your home, the bedroom tax docked disabled people’s housing benefit while knowing that they had little to no way of escaping it.
Precariousness has in many ways come to define the housing crisis, in which more and more families teeter on the brink of eviction due to a cocktail of rising private rents, squeezed wages and benefit cuts. Homelessness – from living in temporary and emergency accommodation to sleeping rough – is the inevitable consequence. In addition to the rise in temporary accommodation, street sleeping has subsequently similarly rocketed in recent years. Going about their day in the years after the recession, no one could fail to notice the renewed presence of rough sleepers: a tent pitched in the local park, rows of sleeping bags on the pavement, makeshift communities of rubbish and blankets housed in the underpass.
More than 12,000 people in Britain are now sleeping rough, according to a report by the charity Crisis in 2018, with a further 12,000 spending their nights in tents, cars, sheds, night buses or even bins.45 The National Audit Office (NAO) estimates rough sleeping has increased by 134 per cent since 2010, with the number of people living on the streets increasing every year since the coalition government first took power.46 Ministers have been quick to pass the buck, with the housing secretary, James Brokenshire, declaring in December 2018 that growing homelessness was down to drug use and family breakdown rather than government policy (he was later forced to partly climb-down from his comments).47 The evidence, however, says something quite different. An independent study in 2015 by the Homelessness Monitor, published by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found ‘welfare reforms’ to be ‘fuelling’ this rapidly worsening homelessness.48 It said that policies including the bedroom tax, sanctions and housing benefit cuts were the biggest single trigger for homelessness after the economy had recovered from the 2008 global crash, with households in London found to be particularly vulnerable.
If you wanted a symbol of the retreat of the state, few would be stronger than the sight of more people sleeping rough. In the age of austerity, homelessness is no longer simply a reality for those on the edge of society, the sad result of a chaotic life or drug and alcohol addiction. Increasingly, almost anyone could find themselves at risk of losing their home; all it takes is the loss of a job, a benefit delay, an insecure tenancy or a spell of ill health. The very people who were previously said to be cushioned from the threat of homelessness find themselves being pushed further to the brink of losing their homes. In 2017 the local government ombudsman warned that even working families were increasingly finding themselves with nowhere to live after losing their private tenancy.49 With emergency accommodation stretching council services, it was suddenly not beyond possibility that rough sleeping might become someone’s only option.
This precariousness was only furthered by the fact that cuts to local authorities t
argeted services that in the past had helped nip problems in the bud before a crisis turned into homelessness, from mental health services, debt advice and welfare rights advisers to relationship mediation services. Similarly, outreach services that previously assisted rough sleepers to take the difficult steps back into housing and employment increasingly turned threadbare or had to shut their doors entirely.
Research by homelessness charity St Mungo’s in 2016 identified lack of specialist mental health provision as the main cause of increased rough sleeping: four out of ten people whom homelessness workers came into contact with had at least one mental health problem, yet 86 per cent reported a lack of beds for people with mental health issues.50 The report calculated that, on average, local authority funding for services for helping ‘vulnerable people’ avoid homelessness was cut by 45 per cent in the five years from when David Cameron’s coalition took power.51 Not only had austerity cuts increased the odds of someone becoming homeless; they had also shredded the safety net that might previously have caught them.
What’s precarious for healthy renters is particularly so for disabled people – who are less likely to be in work or have a high wage and are typically more reliant on social security, while having less choice in the private rental market and higher odds of being cut off from social housing due to the lack of accessible properties. This translated into an explosion in the number of disabled people without a home since the recession. Figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government in December 2017 showed that disabled people have been disproportionately hit by increasing homelessness, with homelessness (defined as including those in temporary accommodation as well as rough sleepers) among people with mental and physical health problems having increased by around 75 per cent since 2010.
Paul has ME and has been sleeping rough in London for nine years. For a decade, the fifty-year-old was working in public relations in the capital, earning £40,000 at his highest point. But holding down a job with a debilitating illness was an uphill battle – ‘By the time I left the company I literally couldn’t string two words together,’ he says of his last role – and in 2001 he had to stop altogether. As for many, the trigger of Paul’s homelessness was losing his private tenancy; an error with a credit rating was enough for him to be evicted from his flat. The stress brought on an ME relapse – exhaustion so severe that he couldn’t get out of bed and was hospitalized for three months. For a while, he was a ‘bed blocker’ – technically well enough to leave but with nowhere else to go, he fought to keep his bed. ‘I wouldn’t let them discharge me to the streets in a wheelchair,’ he says. ‘They did that to some poor unfortunate a few weeks after me and he died the next day.’
To die on Britain’s streets is not a rarity. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) in 2018 found that more than 440 homeless people had died unhoused or in temporary accommodation in the UK in the past year.52 A former soldier, an astrophysicist and a Big Issue seller were among the hundreds found dead in shop doorways, hostels and camping in tents in woodland. Some lay dead for months before their bodies were discovered. Due to the nature of homelessness, studies into deaths vary in their calculations, but each consistently shows a surge in deaths since austerity policies first kicked in. Figures compiled by the Guardian in 2018 found the number of homeless people recorded dying on the streets or in temporary accommodation in the UK had more than doubled over the last five years, with the number increasing year on year since 2013.53 In the capital, where Paul rough sleeps and the only place where a local authority actively records homeless deaths, on average one homeless person died every fortnight between 2010 and 2017.54
It is not hard to imagine how brutal conditions, from subzero temperatures, to violence, to a lack of food or medication, leave people with existing physical illness or mental health problems particularly vulnerable to losing their life, especially at a time when specialist services are dwindling. Deaths of rough sleepers with mental health problems, for example, have subsequently risen sharply in recent years, with the St Mungo’s research showing that four out of five rough sleepers who died in London in 2017 had mental health needs, an increase from three in ten in 2010.55 In March 2019, the Daily Mirror reported the harrowing case of a disabled woman who died on the streets of Leeds in her wheelchair. Known as Tasher by friends and thought to be in her fifties, her body was found in the doorway of House of Fraser.56 There are large swathes of others, like Tasher, at risk: research by disability homelessness charity Good4you estimates that as much as half of London’s homeless population is disabled, be it with physical or mental health problems.57
While ministers speak of promises to always protect ‘the most vulnerable’, it is the people who are struggling with mental illness, fatigue or pain who are in many ways most likely to become homeless. Research from Groundswell, a charity working to support homeless people, in 2018 found that over half of homeless people suffer from chronic pain conditions, such as arthritis (that’s compared to only 12.5 per cent among the general population).58 The charity highlighted that this was a vicious cycle: while the conditions that come with homelessness can lead to chronic pain, almost four in ten of respondents said that pain had contributed to their becoming homeless. Among these participants, nearly seven in ten said that pain made it difficult for them to hold down a job, while half said that pain had caused trouble in personal relationships.59
In the end, Paul was discharged from hospital to a hostel in Brixton; largely bedbound and only able to move with a wheelchair. His local council gave him two options: go on the list for accessible social housing – with an approximately seven-year waiting time – or sign up with a private lettings agency that specialized in helping to house people on benefits. He took the second option. ‘A bad move,’ he says, in retrospect. By doing so, it meant that the council rescinded their obligation to find him alternative accommodation.
Instead, for two years, Paul slept out of his car – a Mini – with his wheelchair folded down in the back and Paul squashed on the passenger seat. Hellish for anyone, but when you’re disabled, it’s torture. Stress and physical exertion are common triggers for an ME relapse and homelessness is a breeding ground. The Groundswell research found that as many as almost nine in ten homeless people (including those with no pre-existing health problems) felt that sleeping rough had an impact on their physical health: from the aches and pains of sleeping out, or the back pain from carrying a backpack all day, to the pain caused to feet from walking around between services.60 Once, Paul was stuck in his car for three days straight during a relapse, unable to move or even talk. ‘That was incredibly frightening,’ he admits.
In the end, the police confiscated the car and Paul had to go back to his council for help. Housing officers asked for proof he was homeless but because he had insurance for his car under his old address, they took it as ‘proof’ that he had a home and refused to help. This refusal is far from uncommon. In 2014, homeless charity Crisis sent ‘mystery shoppers’ (actors posing as single homeless people) to sixteen local authorities across the country in a bid to monitor the service being provided.61 On a number of occasions, mystery shoppers – some of whom played very vulnerable characters – were denied any type of help until they could prove that they were homeless and eligible for assistance, while the local authorities in question made no effort to make enquiries themselves or provide temporary accommodation in the interim. This was particularly the case in London, where housing pressures are especially significant.
Eventually, the council offered Paul some emergency accommodation – what they claimed to be wheelchair-accessible. In fact, it was a third-floor room in a block with no lift; there were four more steps to get up at the front door, and a doorway so narrow that he couldn’t get inside in his wheelchair. When Paul viewed it, the door had been kicked in. There were bloodstains on the mattress. ‘I couldn’t even sit down,’ he says of the dirt. With no help from his council, Paul started what turned into years of bouncing between ma
keshift beds. Sofa-surfing in friends’ homes, or borrowing their cars to sleep in. Hostels. Night shelters. ‘Most have wheelchair access,’ he says. Desperation started to mix with innovation. He slept for three months in a terminal at Heathrow airport. Even a disabled toilet for a while. As he puts it, ‘Simply anything to survive.’
Wherever he goes, Paul carries with him his remaining possessions: a cracked iPad and a large Louis Vuitton bag containing some clothes and toiletries. They are as much practical help as signs of better times; his Louis Vuitton bag was purchased with his first ever decent pay cheque when he was headhunted, he recalls. ‘It’s been my hold-all ever since and has been my one saving grace being homeless,’ he explains. ‘When police spot me sleeping at Heathrow airport, they think I’m travelling and leave me alone.’
After Paul lost his car, he lost the place to store his wheelchair; nowadays, it sits in a storage unit in Battersea. It means that if he has a fatigue crash when he’s not using it, he’s stuck wherever he is at the time – unable to walk but unable to access his wheelchair either. ‘But the security of knowing it’s there if I needed it … that I could send a friend to pick it up … does bring some comfort,’ he says. In the spring of 2018, he had an ME relapse so severe that he couldn’t speak, let alone walk. Being bedbound is particularly brutal when you don’t have your own bed, and for four months he slept in a friend’s spare bedroom, unable to move and waiting to be well enough to get his wheelchair back.
Throughout it all, Disability Living Allowance (DLA) has been Paul’s only way to buy food, toiletries or a night in a shelter. But in the middle of his relapse, as welfare ‘reform’ kicked in, Paul was summoned to an assessment centre to test if he should keep his disability benefit. He had no way to get to the appointment: the test centre he’d been allocated was thirty miles away from where he usually sleeps rough and he has no home to do a home visit in. This isn’t the first time he’s been in this situation; over the years, he’s applied for benefits and appealed decisions almost twenty times. More exhaustion, just to be able to eat. He tends to use a friend’s home for assessments, but this time round officials refused. In the end, he was turned down for his benefits. The assessors said he failed to turn up to the appointment. ‘Even knowing I was bedridden,’ he says.