An end to the verification of street homeless people
We are writing this letter to highlight the potentially deadly experience of street homeless people who are waiting for verification, particularly during times of extreme weather, and provide alternatives.
As I’m sure you’re aware, no homeless person can be given a safe and warm place to sleep unless they have been ‘verified’. This involves a homeless outreach worker physically seeing you ‘bedded down’ (ie in some kind of makeshift bed on the street) and therefore proving that you are sleeping rough as you say you are. No one except a member of the homelessness outreach team can verify you as being street homeless. At best it cantake days for outreach workers to go and ‘verify’ someone sleeping rough, and at worst it never happens.
The Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) is an ‘emergency response to prevent the deaths of people sleeping rough during winter’. It is designed to get people off the streets while the weather is cold enough to be a threat to life. If you’re new to the streets though, what’s stopping you from freezing to death is luck, not SWEP. That’s because even though it’s cold enough for you to die if you sleep outside all night, you still have to be proved to be homeless, by someone seeing you sleeping outside.
Telling someone who sleeps on the streets that they have to keep sleeping on the streets until some random person with a name badge turns up in the middle of the night to ‘verify you’ is bad enough. Telling that to someone when it is minus temperatures, or snowing, is inhumane. The sickest thing is, as a concerned community member, you can’t even let them sleep on your sofa, have a shower, pay for them to stay in a hotel for a night, because they will miss the mysterious and elusive visit from an outreach worker that could literally happen at any moment over multiple days, to a specific spot you’ve said you are sleeping at. Draconian is an understatement.
SWEP being activated itself is an acknowledgement that conditions are cold enough to be a threat to life, and yet the requirement for verification even in these conditions still exists.
Many people in our community are street homeless, or have experienced street homelessness. At South Norwood Community Kitchen we support people who come to us wanting to get off the streets by meeting their basic needs (food, clothes, sleeping bag, etc) and doing our best to get them linked in with homelessness services that can provide them with accommodation. This is never, ever an easy task. This winter, time and time again we have struggled to navigate both Street Link and SWEP in order to ‘prevent the deaths of people sleeping rough’. This winter, a 70 year old vulnerable man was left to sleep outside for 6 nights and a couple new to the streets forced to squat a garage for 3 nights in the snow. We did everything we could to get them inside during that time, to no avail.
We are calling for an end to the pointless verification process, particularly when SWEP is activated. Going into Spring does not mean this problem gets left till next winter. It’s a chance to work with the community to improve the system and stop people freezing to death on the streets of Croydon. Social workers, charities, faith organisations and community projects who all work directly with people sleeping on the streets should be able to verify someone as rough sleeping, without the need for an outreach worker to do so via the convoluted verification process.
The current system is costing lives, unnecessary suffering and leaving support agencies frustrated and powerless in being able to save our vulnerable rough sleepers from freezing to death. A drastic change in how rough sleeping referrals are made and handled needs to be put in place before any more of our community suffer.