London Together
Revolving Doors’ latest report, London Together, shows that many individual services are working well. Form my experience good services are those where the staff have lived experience and really go all out to help their clients. In Islington, where I am from, the drug and alcohol recovery service staff do things like come on Christmas day to cook dinner, and once a month do BBQs and curried goat for clients and actually cook food themselves. It is little tiny things like this that can make a difference. This service also provides housing advice, healthcare, and welfare advice all in one place. But is still cheaper than sending people to prison and provides much more help.
And in neighbouring Camden there are peer-run services at the weekends for homeless people where other service users cook food and bring in films and provide a bit of company for people who might have never had a family through being in children’s homes and prisons all their lives.
These services are doing a good job but there are still huge problems in London
What is wrong in London is that every borough is different and people get lost in the system, particularly when they are moved out of hostels into short-term private rented accommodation on the outskirts of the city and lose contact with all the services that were helping them. They often lose their tenancies and end up back on the streets or back in hostels surrounded by other drug and alcohol users which can trigger relapse – knocking them into a worse situation. Often services don’t work across different boroughs borders and authorities don’t want to help people if they can pass them back to another borough. I have seen this over and over, even when a girl had been kidnapped and raped she was sent away from her original home borough she used to live in and told go back to the area where she’d been attacked to get help.
The upcoming closure of Holloway Prison, the only women’s prison in London, will make things worse as it will separate women from their families making it hard for them to get visits which will impact on their children. Sending women away out of London to prison for minor crimes seems pointless when they could serve community sentences close to home and get some help to change their situation.
Our ask of the new Mayer and London policy-makers
We need a cross London strategy so people are no longer turned away from help situated at the end of their road because they happen to live just one street into the neighbouring borough. Areas need to co-operate rather than pass vulnerable people backwards and forwards.
We need to support people when they first ask for help rather than waiting until they are in crisis. If someone is coming for help with a drug problem, the chances are they will be struggling with rent and could turn to crime. If they were given help with benefits advice and tenancy support before they got evicted then that would save that person from years of misery and save public money in the long term
I think the new Mayor should look at what works well in London and scale it up. For example some of the peer support services and joined-up approaches I mentioned earlier. We also need different approaches to rough sleeping, rather than just helping people for Christmas and then putting them back on the street and forget about them till the following year.
The Capital Gains Project at Revolving Doors has given people who have experienced these issues a voice and a chance to influence policy makers. Let’s hope they listen!
