It’s that time of year again! Yes, Christmas is over, and the festive spirit has been packed away for another year. Now, on the less cheery side of winter, it’s time to dig in and hold out for warmer, brighter days.
It’s also been fucking freezing. And whenever it’s fucking freezing, the same stories about the grim picture of rough sleeping and homelessness across the UK land in our newspapers and on our screens. Right on cue.
Two rough sleepers, 47 year old Anthony Thorn and 26 year old Michael Heaton, died on the streets of Manchester on Boxing Day and 30th December respectively. Then, a few nights ago in the same city, another two rough sleepers were turned away by a Holiday Inn, despite their rooms having been paid for by a local charity. It was minus 6 outside. Thankfully they were accompanied down the road to a Travelodge, who were apparently much nicer, and duly booked them in. Unsurprisingly, Holiday Inn quickly put out a shit we know how bad this looks, we’re really sorry statement.
Shocking those these stories are, they are neither surprising, nor infrequent. They are among countless examples of similar cases, that occur all year, every year. And every year we ask ourselves the same question… how do we stop this madness?
Whenever this debate is rehashed in the media, and in public discourse, the first issue that tends to be raised is housing. There is acknowledgement that this is not the only driver of homelessness of course - mental health, addiction, relationship and community breakdown etc. But there is a tendency in certain elements of the media, particularly on the Left, to suggest that the main driver of the issue is a lack of affordable homes.
At this point it is important for me to distinguish here between homelessness and rough sleeping. According to the latest figures, there are roughly 132,000 families, including 169,000 children, currently living in temporary accommodation. These may include hotels, BnBs, or HMOs (houses of multiple occupancy). Sad and soulless buildings that are not home to anyone, and are no place in which to raise children. A massive state run house building programme, something that we have not seen for over half a century, is desperately needed, and would indeed change their lives, there’s no doubt.
But when it comes to rough sleeping, it’s just not that simple.
Back in 2018, when I was an outreach worker based in South London, I was working with a rough sleeper who’d been on the streets for many years. He slept under a railway bridge next to a busy underground station, and was one of the first people in Britain to be accommodated under the Housing First scheme.
Housing First is a model that was first conceived in the early 90s by a Greek Canadian psychologist called Sam Tsemberis. He argued that instead of forcing rough sleepers to navigate countless obstacles to getting into their own place, it is more effective, humane, and cheaper, to give them their own place in the first instance. Then you provide the wrap-around support necessary in order to help them maintain their tenancy.
It’s a great theory, and when properly implemented, it can work. Unfortunately in this case, it wasn’t properly implemented. Across the UK, local authorities were not given the necessary budget, and so instead of a team of workers supporting one client, you ended up with one worker with a caseload of as many as ten high needs and complex individuals, all needing support in their own homes.
Despite being given a one-bed flat to call his own, my guy kept coming back to sleep under the bridge. His Housing First worker would even ask me to go and see him when I was out on shift, to try and convince him to go back to his flat.
When I would ask him why he wasn’t sleeping in his flat, he would give me different variations of the same answer.
‘It’s too quiet.’
‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘It’s boring.’
You see the pattern.
Clearly taking someone who’s lived on the streets for many years, suffering with all sorts of complex mental health and addiction issues, and just “giving him a house”, is not the silver bullet that some might have you believe.
In the UK we have something called the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP). When there is an extreme weather event, usually a cold snap resulting in the temperature dropping below zero degrees, but this could also include a heatwave or a severe storm, local authorities will offer temporary accommodation to anyone who is rough sleeping - hotels, guest houses etc. This is what those two guys who were turfed out by the Holiday Inn would likely have been being accommodated under.
Interestingly, this is not a statutory, legally binding directive. Councils don’t have to do it, but it has become the status quo purely on a humanitarian basis. It seems obvious that we shouldn’t allow people to die on the streets because of extreme weather, but in this day and age money being spent by local authorities on helping desperate people, purely because it’s the right thing to do, is rare and very welcome.
And there have been times when I’ve been out on outreach shifts when SWEP has been triggered, and offered accommodation to people sleeping on the street, and been turned down. Once I stood over a guy sleeping in an alleyway at 4am, when the dial was at minus 11, and he still said thanks but no thanks.
Now clearly these were not decisions being made by people that were mentally or emotionally stable. Mental ill-health is one of the primary support needs of people who end up rough sleeping. But it shows that just having a roof over your head is not enough of an incentive. In most of these cases the individuals certainly had the capacity to make the decision, and to know why they were making it.
When I worked for a street-sex worker outreach service from 2019-2020, I would spend many hours parked up on a notorious road in South London speaking to our clients. When things were quiet I would observe the behaviour of the many other street dwellers that lurked around those same corners and crossroads. There were two mental health supported accommodation projects nearby, and some of the residents would simply pace up and down the same patches of pavement. Midnight, 1am, 2am… They had “homes” to go to, and beds to sleep in, and yet they chose to be outside, amongst the chaos of the city.
I think I understood why. Four walls, and the silence contained within them, can be like a prison. It can suffocate you, when you have no reason to be there other than because it isn’t outside. At least outside there is life, there is activity, there is something happening.
A sex worker living on the street came to our day centre one morning. I had only been in the job for a few months, and she was a long term client I hadn’t met before. She had disappeared for a while, as they often do, and had come to us in crisis. The breakdown of an abusive relationship, spiraling crack cocaine use, untreated psychosis and schizophrenia, and with no phone and nowhere to sleep.
I took her on a bus to the council’s housing department with the purpose of getting her accommodated. It would have been relatively straight forward. Given her vulnerabilities, she would have been deemed priority need and placed in emergency accommodation. As the bus approached the building she started to get more agitated, and insisted that we get off. She then collapsed on the pavement and started to wail. She didn’t want to go in there, she didn’t want to speak to them, she didn’t want anything they had to offer.
After an anguishing hour or so of trying and failing to convince her to let me help her, I gave up and left. She disappeared again, as was the norm, and she wouldn’t resurface again for many months, by which time she had been seen by different services in different parts of London, almost always rough sleeping. Despite her significant issues, which one could argue certainly impaired her judgement, she was still making a choice. She wanted to be outside.
I’m not saying that access to affordable housing won’t have any impact on the numbers of people rough sleeping. The more suitable accommodation that councils can offer people in crisis the better. Some rough sleepers do choose to take their chances on the streets rather than stay in run down, dilapidated, and in some cases straight up dangerous places, and much improved housing stock would make a difference to them.
My point is that just giving someone somewhere to live is not enough. All these people had somewhere to live at some point, and what happened? They lost their way. They became isolated from themselves and the people around them. They turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with their psychological pain. They developed severe mental health issues and didn’t have the tools or the support to manage them properly. They burned their bridges, and were rejected by conventional society. For some it happened when they were very young. For others it happened much later in life, but either way, you can’t fix it just by giving them a house.
Now you may ask, quite reasonably, how do you fix it?
Obviously if I could answer that in one Substack article then I shouldn’t be sat at my desk in my bedroom, I should be at the side of the Secretary of State for Housing as one of his senior advisors. But in truth it’s a mind bogglingly complex issue, with so many moving parts, and no government in the foreseeable future is likely to come close to solving it.
It’s about the breakdown of communities, and the rise of loneliness and social isolation. It’s about the decline of living standards and the stagnation of wages. It’s about having a totally backward and dysfunctional criminal justice system that prioritises punishment over rehabilitation. It’s about councils and public services being hollowed out and starved of the funding they desperately need. But above all, it’s about the march of a society not made up of citizens with a common set of values, goals and a shared identity, but of individuals siphoned off into their digital silos, increasingly disconnected from each other or any purpose other than to just exist.
Take heart from the knowledge that there are people out there doing what they can to tackle this crisis. That there are protocols, schemes and mechanisms in place, overseen by the public and third sectors, to support people that are desperately in need.
Those guys that died on the street in Manchester weren’t nameless individuals that were forgotten about by a society that didn’t care about them. They were known to services, would have been regularly visited by outreach workers, and were offered different types of accommodation at different points. They just weren’t capable of managing it. They weren’t capable of operating in the version of the world that was presented to them.
We don’t save people like that by putting them in a building and calling it their “home”. We have to present a better version of the world to them. One where they feel connected, and part of something. One where they feel like their life matters, and that it’s worth getting up in the morning. This is what drives you and I to go to work, pay our rent, care for our loved ones. To live our lives. Not burn it up on aluminium foil, or wash it down the drain with a can of Special Brew.
© Teddy Maxwell, 2026. All rights reserved. Please share via link, not by reposting.
Bloody hell Edge. This is wonderfully written. I do wish it was something that was at the front of everyone’s minds when they think about homelessness. I hope it’s at the front of mine….
Another insightful and thought provoking article - your perspective is highly valuable