21 July, 2008

What do you have to do?

Since i became a member of the nearly normal society brigade. I have done quite a lot of interviews and things concerning homelessness and every year it seems I am still writing the same old thing and still talking about ways to tackle homelessness. Strange but true. being homeless isn't a crime yet it does seem to be going that way as council after council try to stop people sleeping on the streets. I have to admit to the ingenious tactics they have used but until we all really admit that there is a problem, which by the way is growing once again.it's estimated that over a thousand people sleep rough on any given night and that over 400 hundred thousand sleep in temporary accommodation such as friends sofa's, hostels and night shelters and so forth. now the summer is here there aren't that many night shelters. It seems to me that over the last three or four years i have met MPs from various parties and they have all sat there and listened and asked questions but to be truthful nothing much seems to have been done. its the same old thing. It all comes down to money said one MP recently. we don't have that much money to spend and what we do spend on homelessness has been tried and tested and we can see a results for what we spent. I have been thinking about this statement for quite a while now and i have come to this conclusion, the results that this or any government see, seems to me to be about the same. one year the figures may be slightly down or static and the next slightly improved and of course we hear about this because any government worth its salt would say things are improving. Even i have to admit that compared with the homeless number ten to twelve years ago there has been a dramatic drop but things speak for themselves and the steady rise we are seeing all over the country needs to be addressed especially when you find people sleeping out of site of the public eye. these are the people that need to be included in any government statistic. we should be looking at new ways to end homelessness for good. it's the thing that has tarnished the reputation of Britain for years. homelessness has been with us as long as history can remember it's time to end it for good. not just hide it while the Olympics are here I know in the past we tried work houses and today they are called hostels but its not the brutal regime of the old days but the same thing applies to both once in one its hard to escape. Coming from me that might seem funny as i have my own flat and live quite a reasonable life but that took me nearly a life time to get because no one really knew how to tackle the problems i had and there are so many out there that don't have as long as i have had unless we learn more about homelessness it's affects on people, the root causes of homeless and how to break the cycle and habits of homelessness. I still believe that former homeless people are the key to getting things right

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