In one corner of the capital, the government's plans to cut the number of rough sleepers on the streets are being put to the test. But do homeless people want to come in from the cold?
"The papers said the streets were awash with kindness. But that’s not why people keep coming back to the streets. It’s because they’re awash with kin," says a man who has been sleeping rough, on and off, for 17 years. "We’ve built up good friends over the years. We’ve built up family."

Tonight he is one of about 50 rough sleepers bedding down on a pavement a stone’s throw from the Savoy Hotel.

Last week homelessness czar Louise Casey called for a culture of kindness towards rough sleepers to be swept away. Here at Savoy Place, Casey’s ideas are being put into practice.

If successful, this experiment, commissioned by Casey’s rough sleepers unit at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, could become a blueprint for cracking the toughest nut of all - cutting rough sleeping by two thirds by 2002.

It’s about a lot more than tackling soup runs though - the unit has asked a group of agencies, headed by Thames Reach, to reduce rough sleeping in the area to as close to zero as possible in four months.

Savoy Place is in many ways an ideal spot for sleeping out. A quiet dead end street, its colonnade of arches shelters those on the pavement from the elements. At the end of September there were 54 people sleeping here: mainly men aged between 16 and 75. Those who sleep here regularly say the drug users tend to stick to one area, and claim that a sense of looking out for each other exists.

The day starts early here. At around quarter to seven each weekday morning the sleepers are woken by security guards from two companies whose premises back directly onto the colonnade, Shelmex and Adelphi. The guards ask the rough sleepers to move, then hose the street down. The street sleepers stay away until the area dries. Regular street cleaners will not come near the homeless people.

Now this routine will happen at weekends too, with a little enforcement from the police, in case of trouble from rough sleepers who want their accustomed lie-in. The advantages are plain, says a handout to the inhabitants of Savoy Place from Charing Cross police homeless unit. "You won’t be sleeping in a toilet for two days a week. Vermin should be reduced by the removal of discarded food and rubbish. After cleaning, you will return to a clean, disinfected and sanitary environment with the obvious advantage to your health." Disruption, the memo says, could result in arrests. "We don’t want that and I don’t think you do either."

Police involvement in Savoy Place at this time is no accident. Like in New York, where rough sleeping has been massively reduced, the police are working in parallel with teams of outreach workers, as part of what Thames Reach describes as "an intensive and co-ordinated approach". No one is talking about criminalising the homeless: it's a matter of lending some authority to the street cleaners, as well as clamping down on begging and dealing.

Until recently the area was visited by several teams of outreach workers, each visiting perhaps once a week, but there was little co-ordination between them. Now Thames Reach is coordinating a new team consisting of workers from St Mungos, London Connection, Thames Reach itself, with support from specialist mental health and drug and alcohol workers. They are there five nights a week.

The team is doing well at meeting its target of moving 50 people a month off the street. In one and a half months, they have moved 75. Special projects outreach team co-ordinator Tom Preest says:"I thought they might find it overkill but I’ve been surprised by the positive response to the amount of outreach." One of the main benefits he says is that the rough sleepers can’t play one set of workers off against another. "It’s one message, one team," he says.

Another reason for the success may be that DETR is paying for emergency beds in a handful of "some of the nicest hostels in London" according to outreach services manager Sue Sommers.

But it is more pressurised than regular outreach work because of high levels of government scrutiny, Preest says. "We’ve got greater resources and that means greater responsibility."

The greatest source of both pressure and outside interest, however, is whether they will be able to deliver a month on month reduction in the amount of rough sleeping to as near to zero as possible by the end of January. And here, crucially, they admit they are failing.

"Our other target is reducing the amount of rough sleeping month on month. And it hasn’t done," she admits."There were 54 at the beginning of the project, and at the end of October, there were 51 sleeping out there."

"What’s happening very simply is that every vacancy is being filled by a new body."

So what is going on? How can a co-ordinated, well-resourced, highly focused, multi-disciplinary initiative be failing to deliver its most crucial target?

Could it be the soup runs that Louise Casey said merely "serviced the problem"? Are the streets so awash with kindness that people actually want to go and live on them - and if they leave, others are keen to fill their spot on the pavement?

Up to six soup runs can turn up at Savoy Place on any one night, says Preest, some coming from as far afield as the Home Counties, mainly completely unco-ordinated. Some of them would be better off helping in their local areas, perhaps offering community support to newly resettled rough sleepers who may be lonely in a new tenancy, he suggests. Yet Preest does not believe that soup runs motivate anyone to start sleeping rough. But they can make it easier for a rough sleeper to ignore an issue that is keeping them on the streets, such as a mental health problem or a drug addiction. quote A soup run is not incentive to go and sleep rough. But it might be a disincentive to stop sleeping rough.

"You can get pretty sick of sandwiches," Sommers adds. "But no one’s going to starve on the street. It’s sustainable. You don’t even need to get up."

Even 26-year-old Gary, a rough sleeper for five years, has mixed feelings about the do-gooders. "I kind of agree there are too many handouts. You get sick and tired of people giving out handouts."

There may be another reason that the overall numbers haven’t dropped. Could it be that a significant minority of the street population are there to save a bit of money, and have adopted a street culture as a way of life? Preest says rough sleeping visibly increases over the winter months because of the availability of extra beds in cold weather shelters. "It's a season where people know that if you come out on the streets you can get into a shelter." Cold weather shelters, he believes, have become a self-perpetuating industry.

People may make themselves homeless or even sublet their flats because they know that for four months they can live for free, he suggests.

One of the Savoy Place sleepers claims he has a flat "just round the corner". So why isn’t he in it? He tells a tale of relationship breakdown, mounting debt, problems with a government employment scheme and the need to "sort his head out". He prefers the camaraderie of the street to his messed-up life. Casey has consistently said that street culture is too attractive. Will she now have to do more to make it a less appealing option?

There may be another reason why the numbers at Savoy Place show no signs of going down. Sommers says: "It’s because the West End is where homeless people come to. The West End is the magnet. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to stem the flow."

This could suggest that in central London at least, reducing street homelessness by two thirds is simply unworkable. Even if there were a bed for every homeless person, and enough move-on accommodation in the capital, perhaps the bright lights of London would always be too much of a lure.

One of the Savoy Place sleepers may agree. He says: "It won’t happen if they force us off the streets, unless they create a fairer society and guide us through it properly. Maybe then there will be a change."

It looks like both Thames Reach and the rough sleepers unit could be faced with a far bigger job than anyone imagined.

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Housing Today