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Not long after 10 countries joined the European Union on 1 May, Tadeusz Mazik, Wieslaw Ociepa and Wlodiermiecz Wierzbicki caught the bus from Poland to London. An engineer, an IT worker and a mechanic, they were all hoping to provide for their families by finding better-paid jobs than those available in the collapsing economy at home.

But the jobs never materialised. Instead, they are now penniless and sleeping rough.

They’re not the only ones. Since 1 May, more than 8000 people have come to Britain from the EU’s new member states. The majority find work and housing soon after they arrive. Some, though, have ended up sleeping on the streets or in doorways near central London’s Victoria coach station: and most of them are Polish. This is placing a great strain on local homelessness charities.

Wierzbicki, who is 26 and has a degree in mechanical engineering, left his job as a McDonald’s manager in Poland because a friend said he could get him a better-paying job in London. But when he reached Victoria, there was no job. “I don’t know why he did that,” says Wierzbicki, staring sadly into a cup of coffee in a different branch of McDonald’s, hundreds of miles from home. “He was so convincing. I wouldn’t have come here otherwise.”

Others have found work but with derisory wages. Mazik, for example, was paid £1 an hour to lay a road. “I did 13 hours’ hard labour a day,” he says. Wierzbicki says he has met other Polish people who were promised a fortnight’s work as potato pickers, with accommodation thrown in. They were driven out to a field, worked all day and were then dropped off at what they thought was their lodgings. But there was no accommodation, they were not paid and they had to find their own way back to London.

In Victoria, the charity taking most of the strain is the Passage, a day centre for homeless people run by the Daughters of Charity. Most of the Polish rough sleepers have gravitated here, while other local charities remain relatively unaffected. It seems the Passage’s name has spread by word of mouth as well as being passed on by staff at the coach station, which is very close. The centre’s director, Sister Ellen Flynn, suspects scam package deals sold in Poland promising work and accommodation may have directed visitors towards her day centre.

The centre usually has 80 or 90 rough sleepers queuing at its doors before it opens in the morning but at its peak, at the end of May, 145 were waiting to go in. “This was a crisis for us because the initial impact was huge,” says Flynn. The day centre always has more clients than its staff can cope with.

To add to the difficulties, there have been tensions between different nationalities. The friction is palpable at the local soup van where Polish, British and Irish people gather to get their evening meal. Some of the British and Irish people think the Poles are taking food away from them. Others talk of fights and say some rough sleepers are becoming afraid to come to the van.

Many say the Poles come to the UK to claim benefits – the fact that they are not entitled to state support doesn’t seem to counteract this view. Some of the charity workers are worried the soup vans will become a flashpoint for conflict between the two groups.

For his part, though, Mazik says he has had no problems while on the streets – either from rough sleepers or the public.

“Generally, the attitude of the British people is pretty friendly. In fact, there was a time when I didn’t have a sleeping bag and a British guy gave me one and showed me a better place to sleep.”

The Poles’ anger is reserved for the scams that they have been subjected to – by Britons and Poles alike. There are tales of Polish agencies demanding £300 for travel, a job and accommodation. Then on arrival the job and the room turn out to be non-existent and the visitor is marooned at Victoria.

The group want the Polish embassy to do more to advise them on getting work and avoiding the scams. Wierzbicki says: “It was my decision to come here and I’m not looking for handouts – I just want to be treated fairly, but there is no information. 

“Everyone knows there is a large group of Polish people around Victoria. There should be some kind of place where you can get your documents filled in and do your CV.”

Flynn says the Passage could give its clients a tailored service, including some help with job hunting, but explains: “We would be reluctant to open a service for them because it just exacerbates the arrivals; but while we have this influx we have considered setting up an alternative group for them with an interpreter and jobs advice to help them to move through and not become vulnerable.

“That would be quite a big investment for us, however. We’ve only just started trying to alert the Home Office and the ODPM that this is occurring and we’d expect assistance if we were going to help these clients.”

The charities see two groups of Poles, each with a different set of problems. For many, their only obstacle is unemployment. Often they will sleep rough for only a short time before finding somewhere to stay.

The ones the homelessness charities are concerned about, however, are those who don’t manage to move off the street.

“It’s very easy, when you start living on the street, to get stuck on the street,” says Petra Salva, outreach services manager for homelessness charity Thames Reach Bondway, which works with the Passage to contact rough sleepers.

“They will get more desperate, more lonely and seek comfort in numbers. The people we see in the Passage will be the ones seeking help. The ones I worry about are those who are not doing so.

“Already some people are joining drinking schools [groups of homeless alcoholics]. Either they could have been a drinker in Poland or have given up but restarted here, we don’t know.”

It was my decision to come here, and I'm not looking for handouts – I just want to be treated fairly

Wlodiermiecz Wierzbicki

You’re speaking my language

The Passage has been meeting the basic needs of Victoria’s Polish rough sleepers, such as food and showers, and has strengthened its links with other centres with spare capacity and Polish-speaking staff. It has hired an interpreter, whom it shares with the outreach team from Thames Reach Bondway. A leaflet, translated into Polish, directs people to other services.

Westminster council, which is responsible for the Victoria area and is renowned for its efforts to end rough sleeping, is also keen to find ways of getting the influx of Polish immigrants off the streets.

Council leader Simon Milton says: “We’ve been successful in getting people into accommodation, only to get a flow of people coming onto the street from outside the UK.” It’s a particularly acute problem for Westminster, he says, because many rough sleepers stay near their point of arrival, Victoria station, rather than spreading out around the country.

Polish community centres have already had some success helping people to get work and Milton agrees with Wierzbicki that the Polish government or embassy should provide resources for them to expand this work. He also suggests that there should be signs in Victoria coach station in appropriate languages pointing visitors from EU accession states to the right services, not just to the Passage.

But Polish consul general Tomas Trafas says the Polish government has provided information on getting jobs in the UK. “The main issue we face has been the image created by the [Polish] media that there were half a million free jobs waiting here,” he says. “At the beginning, people were naive, they thought everything was possible.

“We prepared a leaflet with the Association of Poles in Great Britain and one with the Department of Trade and Industry and there is also information prepared by the Home Office in Polish.” However, he confirms that the consulate will not help Poles with finding work. “It’s not a consular duty,” he explains.

Three weeks ago, Milton wrote to Des Browne, the Home Office minister of citizenship and immigration, asking for a meeting to discuss the issue of EU immigrants sleeping rough. He is adamant that central government must bear some responsibility for the problem because it did not form a proper strategy for dealing with people arriving from EU accession countries.

Immigrants for all seasons

At the end of February, the government decided that citizens coming from the accession countries should not be able to claim benefits or get social housing until they had worked here for a full year. But many of those affected are here for seasonal work. They would not be able to get places in hostels for the homeless because these are usually paid for through housing benefit.

Milton thinks the government should look at its racketeering laws to see whether they are adequate to prevent the employment and accommodation scams experienced by so many of the Poles, and he believes there should be a vetting service in Poland so that only people with good English and skills needed in the UK make the journey to look for work in London.

The council and charities fear, though, that central government may see the issue as a London problem and something it is not interested in helping to solve.

The Home Office is arranging a meeting with Westminster council. A spokesman says the government has worked on the regulations for EU enlargement since last year. However, he explains, the measures could not be brought forward until parliament ratified the accession treaty at the end of last year. The decisions of other European countries on rules for migrants from the accession states had been taken into account.

Milton has an even more radical suggestion, though. “We think the solution could be to charter a bus to get them back to Poland, for which government should share some of the responsibility,” says Milton.

“We are looking at getting some of the rough sleepers back to their own countries because we are aware that some of the Polish people have been victims of scams bringing them into the country with promises of jobs that weren’t there, and don’t have English language skills.”

Emergency loans

Consul general Trafas says the consulate can provide loans to help people return to Poland, but only in “extreme circumstances”. He says: “Each individual case is looked at so I don’t want to give the impression that everyone who applies for support gets it. People must be in some kind of difficulty that qualifies, perhaps health problems, victims of crime, family problems. They can borrow money from the state treasury and they must pay it back in Poland.”

But on the streets of Victoria, few people want to return to Poland. Some would leave now if they could but others are determined to stay until they find work and would feel ashamed to go back empty-handed.

“I will stay here until I find a job,” says Mazik. “I’m still positive and hope something might come along. I will stay here until I decide I cannot go on. How long that will be is up to my strength.”