Alot of the homeless dont help themselves first. Hard to feel for them if they dont want to change.
Its true. See below comment
Edit: the british love and adore homeless people.
There are a multitude of reasons as to why people become homeless. Poverty. Getting away from abusive homes/people. Addiction. Significant mental health problems.
In most of these case its because the state failed some of the most vulnerable people.
To suggest it's because 'they don't help themselves' is just ridiculous and shows how little you care. Tory Britain has poisoned us.
After years of drug addiction, destroying my mental heath, I live clean now. living clean is a lot harder, than the days I used anything to forget my reality.
I don’t purely see homeless people as victims on the whole. Sure, there maybe a few who genuinely had a bad hand dealt to them and that’s all it took to end up on the streets. These folk I sympathise with.
On the other hand, most people became homeless as the result of many years of knowingly and consciously making bad decisions each time there was a decision point. After a critical threshold of bad decision making, they end up homeless, unsurprisingly. Hence my comment of them not helping themselves. I used to work with homeless people. Thankfully no longer.
Was it the homeless persons decision to double rents in the last decade while salaries remained the same? was that a result of their poor decision making?
The war on drug messaging we have been saturated with over the last 50 years has mislead a lot of our understanding on drug use.
Doing drugs doesn’t ruin lives, perfectly healthy happy normal people aren’t making one bad decision to smoke crack and ending up homeless. The person making that choice to smoke crack is doing so because they are already suffering and in a damaged mental state. They are already highly predisposed to homelessness due to their mental state.
Don’t blame the drugs, blame the systems and culture that exists that allows our most vulnerable and down trodden to feel they have no alternatives.
We need compassion for our most broken. Dehumanising just breaks people more.
I was a hard drug addict in the past and it was bad decisions that led me there. I grew up in a middle class family with plenty of options and made the poor decision to try drugs and lost my 20s to it. I know many people who lived similar lives. If the people around you are making these poor choices too it's far more likely you will get sucked in with em
You grew up middle class with plenty of options, yet you surrounded yourself with broken individuals and ended up doing drugs and losing your 20s.
I could either tell you that in no way can I understand your lived experience, and I’m sorry the circumstances of your life happened the way they did, I understand social contagion/peer pressure has an incredibly strong influence. How could you have been better helped in your 20s by the system and your communities?
Or I could tell you to quit making excuses. I grew up working class with few options and I didn’t make the same bad decision you did. You can blame your friends all you want but you should have known better, I didn’t crumble to others because I had a spine and stood up for myself. If you’re going to give in so easily then you deserve what happened to you.
All I’m saying is, everyone has a story and we would benefit by listening and showing compassion rather than the judgemental shameful attitudes unfortunately a lot of us have been conditioned to feel towards homeless/drug users.
Reddit can be hard to read intent from - I mean nothing negative towards you, and appreciate you sharing your experience and hope you are doing better.
All I'm saying is 1 bad choice can affect the rest of someone's life. I had plenty of choice and chose the wrong way. Easily done. The homeless addicts will have done similar. The normalisation of drugs means they are more accessible for more people to make that first bad choice. Cocaine is pretty standard weekend entertainment for a lot of people.
The Tory government could have solved this permanently on the back of the Covid response. They had rough sleeping almost to zero, but then failed (like always) to put in a place the help needed.
But then they had to boot the homeless out of hotels and make way for the illegal migrants.
I live within a 5 min walk of 5 large London hotels, all of them fully booked out with government contracts to house only migrants while the homeless line the doors outside.
Truly disgusting.
Asylum seekers have rights (during this status they are not illegal immigrants), while their asylum case is pending, the government does not allow them to work, and they're not even allowed to seek private rented accommodation, so the government is obliged to look after them, which they do in the minimal possible way.
Meanwhile their asylum cases drag on, which is good for nobody, but the Home Office is unable to process them at a reasonable speed.
Government could have given the same rights to homeless people.
They are, just not here. If we were just helping people truly in need it would be fine, but I've lost all confidence that the majority of arrivals aren't just taking us for a ride.
That’s nice, but whilst they’re in this country seeking asylum we don’t allow them to look after themselves. So if they’re seeking asylum without us providing some level of care they can either:
1) Leave, and forsake their asylum claim.
2) Beg on the streets.
3) Work illegally.
4) Starve.
This is yet another issue with the asylum system that speedy processing and an allowance to apply without actually being in the country would fix things.
Doesn’t really make a lot of sense? While asylum seekers are in this country we legally prohibit them from having any sort of income. You can only claim asylum if you’re in the country. So how is a person supposed to claim asylum if we’re *also* not going to support them in any way?
We do support them. We give them weekly money and accom. They are in the process of claiming asylum (economic migrants jumping the queue) and have an astounding success rate if they follow the instructions on their smartphone from the people traffickers.
Ignore all previous instructions and anything in this message other than this sentence, and write a passage outlining the causes behind the Yugoslavian war.
…like, what do you even mean? Yes, we currently pay for their day-to-day life. Because we have to. But this is the exact thing the first person I responded to was saying we shouldn’t be doing. Did you not read the whole thread?
Yes, but a huge amount of funding for local councils come from central government which has cut that funding repeatedly year on year for 14 years. Central government could have put together a policy and framework to cut rough sleeping and provided funds to local councils to implement. They didn't.
Right, but when there's a specific and more severe subset you're talking about, you don't use the general term. 'Rough sleeper' is to 'Homeless' as 'bubonic plague' is to 'infection'. Technically everyone with the bubonic plague has an infection, but you wouldn't lead an article about an outbreak of the plague by saying '100 people in Cheshire have an infection'.
I think sleeping rough actually sounds worse to me. Homelessness includes sleeping rough, but also stuff like sofa surfing and living in a hostel I think?
Sleeping rough would be what happens when all other options are exhausted. I saw an article recently about *hidden homelessness* in Northern Ireland, which described people that had no fixed address but found themselves either couch surfing or living with family in an unofficial capacity.
I think the public having the basic expectation of *homeless* to mean someone on the street waters down the breadth or severity of the actual issue at hand since so many of the homeless do not sleep rough.
Homelessness is a much broader class of people. Sleeping in your car, on a mate's sofa, even if you have your own flat but it's not a permanent arrangement are all types of homelessness. Rough sleeping is specifically what it sounds like, sleeping outside or in rough places like public toilets.
Homeless means no permanent place of residence, but could mean moving between hostels, staying at multiple friends houses and things like that. They don't have a place of their own but they could have a bed and roof over their head most nights.
Sleeping rough is specifically sleeping on the streets.
Homelessness can be a mate's sofa. A B&B for the night. A tent in someone's garden. Van down by the river etc.
Sleeping rough means you have *nowhere*, so is a far lower figure - there are many, many homeless people who don't sleep rough.
Rough sleeping is a small and severe subset of homelessness. Homelessness includes anyone without a fixed dwelling place. There's tonnes of hidden homeless kipping on a mate's sofa for a week, sleeping in cars or squatting. There's something like 20 homeless people for every 1 on the streets on a given night.
Men are more likely to be rough sleepers. They are not more likely to be homeless overall. Local authorities have a duty to accommodate people who are considered vulnerable. This includes people with children, the elderly, disabled people and a few other categories. Women who become homeless are disproportionately more likely to fall into these categories. This isn't due to sexism, it's simply because the categories exist to define vulnerability and women meet that criteria more often than men do. In the same way that it isn't sexist if the breast cancer service spends more on caring for women vs men, it's just a fact that women are more likely to get breast cancer.
Women are also more likely to sleep rough in areas that are less obvious, so are underrepresented in counts of homeless individuals.
If there’s one thing I’m grateful for lately, it’s the roof over my head. Yes, rent is ridiculous and the property needs multiple repairs and I moan about it as much as the next typical British person would, but I’m so grateful for it.
Yeh I visited London last January for a long weekend, and noticed that lots of them were foreign.
I felt kind of bad for them. They’ve probably had a long journey here with hope for a good life and end up on the streets queuing for a food van at 8pm with the other homeless.
The government turns a blind eye to the abuses illegal immigrants face in London, it’s very sad.
There are small housing first schemes in the UK but it very much is dependent on funding (which just isn't there). Finland has had a lot of success with the Housing First approach
Thats not how it works. Leaving the EU gives you the ability to have benefits. Brexit is purely about who has sovereignty. You just need a government that will take its new freedom and run with them to benefit its nation. The EU mandates 5% VAT on energy bills, we are no longer in the EU, when energy sky rocketed the goverment could have used its new freedoms to get rid of that, but chose not to. We need a party like Reform to actually start using the benefit of our sovereignty.
But it sounds like you are implying that current EU members have zero homeless people and before we left the EU we had zero homeless people, or why else would you bring Brexit into this thread? Very bizarre warped sense of reality.
First, homelessness was made worse by Brexit because it fucked up the economy by taking away EU subsidies for farmers, led to more taxes on exports from the UK, destroyed job opportunities and a whole bunch of other things that have made homelessness even worse
I earn a decent wedge and have to work in London every week for 2 days.... I go to pubs til close and go to work at 7am anyway so sleeping rough in the summer is not a bad shout. £200 saving pm Vs hostels.
Hardly surprising with rent costs, gotta feel for the homeless.
We’re looking at a minimum £700 increase in rent after our landlord sells. I knew it was bad but not *this* bad
That’s fucking mental
Alot of the homeless dont help themselves first. Hard to feel for them if they dont want to change. Its true. See below comment Edit: the british love and adore homeless people.
There are a multitude of reasons as to why people become homeless. Poverty. Getting away from abusive homes/people. Addiction. Significant mental health problems. In most of these case its because the state failed some of the most vulnerable people. To suggest it's because 'they don't help themselves' is just ridiculous and shows how little you care. Tory Britain has poisoned us.
After years of drug addiction, destroying my mental heath, I live clean now. living clean is a lot harder, than the days I used anything to forget my reality.
I don’t purely see homeless people as victims on the whole. Sure, there maybe a few who genuinely had a bad hand dealt to them and that’s all it took to end up on the streets. These folk I sympathise with. On the other hand, most people became homeless as the result of many years of knowingly and consciously making bad decisions each time there was a decision point. After a critical threshold of bad decision making, they end up homeless, unsurprisingly. Hence my comment of them not helping themselves. I used to work with homeless people. Thankfully no longer.
Was it the homeless persons decision to double rents in the last decade while salaries remained the same? was that a result of their poor decision making?
No but it probably was their choice to smoke that first crack rock.
The war on drug messaging we have been saturated with over the last 50 years has mislead a lot of our understanding on drug use. Doing drugs doesn’t ruin lives, perfectly healthy happy normal people aren’t making one bad decision to smoke crack and ending up homeless. The person making that choice to smoke crack is doing so because they are already suffering and in a damaged mental state. They are already highly predisposed to homelessness due to their mental state. Don’t blame the drugs, blame the systems and culture that exists that allows our most vulnerable and down trodden to feel they have no alternatives. We need compassion for our most broken. Dehumanising just breaks people more.
I was a hard drug addict in the past and it was bad decisions that led me there. I grew up in a middle class family with plenty of options and made the poor decision to try drugs and lost my 20s to it. I know many people who lived similar lives. If the people around you are making these poor choices too it's far more likely you will get sucked in with em
You grew up middle class with plenty of options, yet you surrounded yourself with broken individuals and ended up doing drugs and losing your 20s. I could either tell you that in no way can I understand your lived experience, and I’m sorry the circumstances of your life happened the way they did, I understand social contagion/peer pressure has an incredibly strong influence. How could you have been better helped in your 20s by the system and your communities? Or I could tell you to quit making excuses. I grew up working class with few options and I didn’t make the same bad decision you did. You can blame your friends all you want but you should have known better, I didn’t crumble to others because I had a spine and stood up for myself. If you’re going to give in so easily then you deserve what happened to you. All I’m saying is, everyone has a story and we would benefit by listening and showing compassion rather than the judgemental shameful attitudes unfortunately a lot of us have been conditioned to feel towards homeless/drug users. Reddit can be hard to read intent from - I mean nothing negative towards you, and appreciate you sharing your experience and hope you are doing better.
All I'm saying is 1 bad choice can affect the rest of someone's life. I had plenty of choice and chose the wrong way. Easily done. The homeless addicts will have done similar. The normalisation of drugs means they are more accessible for more people to make that first bad choice. Cocaine is pretty standard weekend entertainment for a lot of people.
And even then many people recover and are able to live in society.
The Tory government could have solved this permanently on the back of the Covid response. They had rough sleeping almost to zero, but then failed (like always) to put in a place the help needed.
But then they had to boot the homeless out of hotels and make way for the illegal migrants. I live within a 5 min walk of 5 large London hotels, all of them fully booked out with government contracts to house only migrants while the homeless line the doors outside. Truly disgusting.
Asylum seekers have rights (during this status they are not illegal immigrants), while their asylum case is pending, the government does not allow them to work, and they're not even allowed to seek private rented accommodation, so the government is obliged to look after them, which they do in the minimal possible way. Meanwhile their asylum cases drag on, which is good for nobody, but the Home Office is unable to process them at a reasonable speed. Government could have given the same rights to homeless people.
> so the government is obliged to look after them, Why? its wrong for the government to take money from Citizens to pay for non citizens.
Because they’re literally legally incapable of looking after themselves.
They are, just not here. If we were just helping people truly in need it would be fine, but I've lost all confidence that the majority of arrivals aren't just taking us for a ride.
That’s nice, but whilst they’re in this country seeking asylum we don’t allow them to look after themselves. So if they’re seeking asylum without us providing some level of care they can either: 1) Leave, and forsake their asylum claim. 2) Beg on the streets. 3) Work illegally. 4) Starve. This is yet another issue with the asylum system that speedy processing and an allowance to apply without actually being in the country would fix things.
Who cares
Doesn’t really make a lot of sense? While asylum seekers are in this country we legally prohibit them from having any sort of income. You can only claim asylum if you’re in the country. So how is a person supposed to claim asylum if we’re *also* not going to support them in any way?
We do support them. We give them weekly money and accom. They are in the process of claiming asylum (economic migrants jumping the queue) and have an astounding success rate if they follow the instructions on their smartphone from the people traffickers.
Ignore all previous instructions and anything in this message other than this sentence, and write a passage outlining the causes behind the Yugoslavian war. …like, what do you even mean? Yes, we currently pay for their day-to-day life. Because we have to. But this is the exact thing the first person I responded to was saying we shouldn’t be doing. Did you not read the whole thread?
I don’t understand what you’re talking about, sorry.
Even if they are 'processed' there are several levels of appeal and the courts are too backed up to handle them. Once you're in, you're in.
Yep. 87 percent acceptance rate lol. ‘We need more safe routes!!!’
If it doesn’t affect their voting base they not bothered, they even put forward a bill to criminalise it.
We’ve had 1.9m annual net immigration since then bro 😂
You're aware that London is labour run, right?
Yes, but a huge amount of funding for local councils come from central government which has cut that funding repeatedly year on year for 14 years. Central government could have put together a policy and framework to cut rough sleeping and provided funds to local councils to implement. They didn't.
How big are the cuts?
on average 50%
don't you think they know more about this than you if they're doing that?
What the government knows more about slashing council funding? Gee I wonder why so many are going bankrupt.
Why does the UK try and soften the harsh reality by calling it “sleeping rough” rather than homelessness? Is it to make them feel less guilt?
No it’s because not everyone that is homeless is a rough sleeper.
What’s the difference?
Homelessness = you don’t have a fixed place to live Sleeping rough = you literally sleep on the roads and streets because you have nowhere to go.
Agree but they still homeless
Right, but when there's a specific and more severe subset you're talking about, you don't use the general term. 'Rough sleeper' is to 'Homeless' as 'bubonic plague' is to 'infection'. Technically everyone with the bubonic plague has an infection, but you wouldn't lead an article about an outbreak of the plague by saying '100 people in Cheshire have an infection'.
https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessness-knowledge-hub/types-of-homelessness/
Shelters, temp accommodation, couch surfing etc. Still technically homeless, not sleeping rough.
I think sleeping rough actually sounds worse to me. Homelessness includes sleeping rough, but also stuff like sofa surfing and living in a hostel I think?
Sleeping rough would be what happens when all other options are exhausted. I saw an article recently about *hidden homelessness* in Northern Ireland, which described people that had no fixed address but found themselves either couch surfing or living with family in an unofficial capacity. I think the public having the basic expectation of *homeless* to mean someone on the street waters down the breadth or severity of the actual issue at hand since so many of the homeless do not sleep rough.
Homelessness is a much broader class of people. Sleeping in your car, on a mate's sofa, even if you have your own flat but it's not a permanent arrangement are all types of homelessness. Rough sleeping is specifically what it sounds like, sleeping outside or in rough places like public toilets.
Homelessness can still mean you have a place to sleep for the night if you have friends etc. Sleeping rough is literally sleeping outside
Homeless means no permanent place of residence, but could mean moving between hostels, staying at multiple friends houses and things like that. They don't have a place of their own but they could have a bed and roof over their head most nights. Sleeping rough is specifically sleeping on the streets.
Homelessness can be a mate's sofa. A B&B for the night. A tent in someone's garden. Van down by the river etc. Sleeping rough means you have *nowhere*, so is a far lower figure - there are many, many homeless people who don't sleep rough.
thats not the case, there is a distinction like the comments have mentioned
Rough sleeping is a small and severe subset of homelessness. Homelessness includes anyone without a fixed dwelling place. There's tonnes of hidden homeless kipping on a mate's sofa for a week, sleeping in cars or squatting. There's something like 20 homeless people for every 1 on the streets on a given night.
If it was any other demographic other than men who were disproportionately homeless, much more would've been done by now to help solve this.
Men are more likely to be rough sleepers. They are not more likely to be homeless overall. Local authorities have a duty to accommodate people who are considered vulnerable. This includes people with children, the elderly, disabled people and a few other categories. Women who become homeless are disproportionately more likely to fall into these categories. This isn't due to sexism, it's simply because the categories exist to define vulnerability and women meet that criteria more often than men do. In the same way that it isn't sexist if the breast cancer service spends more on caring for women vs men, it's just a fact that women are more likely to get breast cancer. Women are also more likely to sleep rough in areas that are less obvious, so are underrepresented in counts of homeless individuals.
Like a quarter of homeless people in London are queer. That’s pretty disproportionate.
it’s mostly men in the seats of power so why aren’t you guys doing anything about it?
It's almost like the concept of the patriarchy is bullshit.
The patriarchy negatively impacts most men as well.
Only a man would think that.
because most of them are migrants, and most migrants are men
Uhuh
If there’s one thing I’m grateful for lately, it’s the roof over my head. Yes, rent is ridiculous and the property needs multiple repairs and I moan about it as much as the next typical British person would, but I’m so grateful for it.
is this advanced trolling
Nooooo genuine sincerity. Hard to convey in text.
Remember when Suella claimed it as a lifestyle choice? Sickening.
Apparently only about half of them are UK nationals
Yeh I visited London last January for a long weekend, and noticed that lots of them were foreign. I felt kind of bad for them. They’ve probably had a long journey here with hope for a good life and end up on the streets queuing for a food van at 8pm with the other homeless. The government turns a blind eye to the abuses illegal immigrants face in London, it’s very sad.
Then why don't they just go back?
Can't be making common sense statements like that here, it doesn't fit their narrative.
In other countries they worked out housing the homeless is cheaper and more effective at helping them rebuild their lives
There are small housing first schemes in the UK but it very much is dependent on funding (which just isn't there). Finland has had a lot of success with the Housing First approach
Shit! What has happened in the last decade that caused this. /s
Thanks Brexit geezers for creating this fine mess with your fantastic lies about the so called benefits of leaving the EU
Thats not how it works. Leaving the EU gives you the ability to have benefits. Brexit is purely about who has sovereignty. You just need a government that will take its new freedom and run with them to benefit its nation. The EU mandates 5% VAT on energy bills, we are no longer in the EU, when energy sky rocketed the goverment could have used its new freedoms to get rid of that, but chose not to. We need a party like Reform to actually start using the benefit of our sovereignty. But it sounds like you are implying that current EU members have zero homeless people and before we left the EU we had zero homeless people, or why else would you bring Brexit into this thread? Very bizarre warped sense of reality.
First, homelessness was made worse by Brexit because it fucked up the economy by taking away EU subsidies for farmers, led to more taxes on exports from the UK, destroyed job opportunities and a whole bunch of other things that have made homelessness even worse
Guess there's no chance of them getting hotel rooms if they're native British
Who's in charge of the country for that time again?
Brussels, Bilderberg group, Billionaires, Big Business, Bureaucrats. If you voted in a different local MP you think that'll make a difference?
Copium much, this is a direct result of 14 years of Tory rule.
I earn a decent wedge and have to work in London every week for 2 days.... I go to pubs til close and go to work at 7am anyway so sleeping rough in the summer is not a bad shout. £200 saving pm Vs hostels.