Hi Neil,

Personally think the hosing down of sleeping spots is disgusting, and smacks all too much of wanting to pretty the place up a bit as befits an Olympic city…

Think it’s important to look at the reasons for homelessness. Drug and alcohol problems seem to rank high on the list – have posted short case study/interview things I’ve done with homeless people here before (https://liberalconspiracy.org/2008/03/18/the-benefit-of-benefits/) and a lot of these people either had serious substance abuse and/or mental health problems. (They didn’t necessarily get a lot of sympathy from commentators, either). They were in and out of hostels, etc, a lot, and didn’t particularly care for them – lots of rules at hostels, and lots of very difficult clientele to be sharing space with.

All of which is a way of saying that you’d probably go a long way towards getting people off the streets if there was a god resourcing for drug and alcohol treatment programmes, and support for people with serious mental health problems. Alas, drug and alcohol services, and mental health services, etc, seem to struggle to stay afloat – off the top of my head, I know that Maudsley has been under (funding) attack, and mental health care provision threatened in Manchester and Newcastle (mostly know this because Karen Reissman and Yunus Bakhsh were both sacked for opposing cuts to those services).

All of which is a long way of saying that I don’t think washing down a few steps outside the church on Deptford high street is going to cure a rough sleeper’s heroin problem. Hosing streets in that case doesn’t just sound like a cruel thing to do – it IS a cruel thing to do.

think i meant ‘good resourcing’ instead of ‘god resourcing’ although i kind of like the way ‘god resourcing looks’

At least part of the problem stems from the fact that many rough sleepers are mentally ill. Few would ‘choose’ that lifestyle. In the 1980s and 90s when many institutions that had incarcerated thousands of mental patients were (rightly) shut down, the inmates were decanted into ‘the community’ without adequate support (incidentally, this is one reason why there was an increase in incapacity benefit claimants). Many found themselves – or ‘chose’ a life on the streets. The same problem exists today, with inadequate support for those with mental illness or suffering from trauma and unable to cope with day to day living. Many more are living off the street but in conditions of squalor. Unfortunately, the Thatcherites (and their Blairite acolytes) found that giving adequate support in the community was a costly business and so the lifelines were cut. Ironically, the subsequent increase in claimants was then used as a stick to beat everyone else on incapacity benefit – with the resultant ‘clampdown’ (despite the fact that numbers have been falling for a decade).

Hosing down sleepers’ sites will move them on, but it doesn’t address the problem (which costs money). I guess that, if the homeless in China had been similarly treated the right right-wing press would have been up in arms about the iniquities of communism.

Hi Kate,

Hosing streets in that case doesn’t just sound like a cruel thing to do – it IS a cruel thing to do.

Yeah, I might’ve leaned a little to heavily on being devil’s advocate at the beginning, though I did, in my own strange, meandering type of way, reach that conclusion by the end. What led me to write about this as a flawed policy carried out in good faith rather than with malice was the involvement of the homeless charity Broadway. This might’ve been naivety on my part, i don’t know – I’m certainly far less aware of their work than Shelter, for example. But regardless of the intentions, it’s certainly a questionable endeavour.

Your points about drink/drug addiction & mental health problems among the homeless are well worth restating; it seems to me that if someone’s hell-bent on continuing their addiction, they’re not going to be stopped simply by having a council van hose down where they might have slept. Rather than think ‘I’ve seen the light, I’ll go to a refuge now’, what’s more likely is they’d move on to somewhere that’s potentially less safe. We should also consider that a corrosive mistrust could develop towards anyone who actually does try to help them.

As for your comments about resources for mental health/substance abuse treatment… well, in a ‘fair society’ I would hope it’d be a priority….

Great points, Chuck H, and a sad reminder of what happens when we try to do these things on the cheap.

“I guess that, if the homeless in China had been similarly treated the right right-wing press would have been up in arms about the iniquities of communism.”

You can count on it.

Hi Neil,

Fair points all. Chuck H is right as well – it’s simply not enough to see homelessness as the problem. There are reasons for the homelessness – I would even go as far as to say there are ALWAYS reasons for the homelessness. I don’t think that homelessness is something that anyone actively chooses and/or enjoys. Nobody sits outside in the freezing cold in the middle of winter thinking – ‘hey, this is good. I must do more of this.’

Addiction is an awful card to be dealt. I don’t think addiction is something people actively choose, either. I think they can choose to seek treatment and support – but only if the treatment and support is available and from the earliest point possible, and that means from the time that the addictive tendencies start to show themselves. It’s not easy to get that help if health services in your area are being closed down, or if there’s a fast turnover of support staff in your area, because resources are so scarce. There’s no continuity there – you get one social worker, and just when you’re getting used to that person, they leave, and you’re given someone else, if there is someone else to be given, etc. It’s very difficult for people – they get moved around to different outlets all the time.

I find the lack of sympathy for people with these issues quite extraordinary – as I say, some of the comments left on some of the articles I posted here surprised me. There is absolutely nothing to say that any one of us might be affected by these issues at any time – I might not be an addict, but one of my kids or nephews could turn out to be. No-one is above life.

Although – can’t say I would mind seeing a Lehman brother getting himself hosed off the pavement when trying to set up home in a Harvey Nichols cardboard box. I might even ask for a turn with the hose.

Perhaps we should run a guest column by someone from Centrepoint (or some such place) to enlighten us further on the relative significance of

- lack of supply (in terms of detox beds and places in rehab facilities), and
- lack of demand – by which I mean homeless (and indeed other) addicts accepting that the game is up. Because that involves a paradox: a mentally ill person taking a sane decision.

In a further paradox, this is one area where the targets culture might actually be appropriate – e.g. to get a homeless person into a detox (and then a half-way house) within, I dunno – 72 hours? a week?

Yes, it is an appalling attitude by the authorities – almost medieval in its approach. Something that did surprise me in research carried out by York University’s centre for housing policy was the positive use of Asbos in dealing with rough sleepers. It appears that in many cases the orders served as a prompt to the recipients to seek help. However, the key is access to outreach workers, something that could be achieved by transferring the money spent on despatching an army of sprayers to the social care budget. But that isn’t teaching anyone a lesson, is it, which is what “hot washing”, also known as “wetting down”, is about.

I was horrified by the Guardian article on this issue, and have set up an online petition to protest against the use of ‘wetting down’ sleeping spaces by the City of London council.

Please go to http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopthewashdown to sign.

We also have a facebook group – search for ’stop the wash’ from http://www.facebook.com

Thanks-
Sian