In the carefully maintained gardens opposite Cardiff city hall, a chaotically constructed makeshift hut is home to one of the Welsh capital’s many rough sleepers. Cardboard boxes, wooden pallets and discarded plastic bags combine to form a shelter from the rain and wind. An empty pram sits outside the hut’s polystyrene door, filled with trainers and other useful items for living on the street.
Three tents have been erected a few metres away. Across the road, a larger structure stands with a camping chair outside, a jacket thrown over the back. But some of the inhabitants do not expect to be there much longer. The council has given two of the tent residents 24 hours to find somewhere else to set up camp.
“I find it very cold [living in a tent] sometimes but you have to really grab lots of people and keep together for body heat. I have slept in the rain with a blanket over me and woke up shivering and soaking wet,” says Mike (not his real name), one of the rough sleepers told to move on.
His brother, Ian, has also been told he must leave the area. They always camp next to one another, he says – the council moved them off from somewhere the night before and they had to move all their belongings.
“The council often take our stuff. I have lost three tents already and so has my brother. That is six tents altogether,” Ian says. He says he had a house in Cardiff when he was younger but when his grandparents died he ended up in foster care and then became homeless. “I would prefer to live in a tent than a scruffy flat. I have clothes and a blow-up bed in here.”
Ian says the council moves their tents depending on how many times they have been warned. But he is sceptical about an alternative to the game of cat and mouse with authorities.
“The homeless shelter is full of drugs. I don’t do drugs. Well, I only do one particular drug and it is not heroin or crack. I do [the synthethic cannabinoid] spice. I am manic depressive so it puts me on a level … I should not be on the streets. I was a priority case but I lost that due to walking out of hostels because of how awful they were. I had tuberculosis at one point and so did my brother. We kept getting chest infections from hostels. On the streets we have fresh air,” he says.
Mike says he does not like how his belongings are handled when the authorities try to move them on. “Everything is thrown away and you have to start again from scratch … I beg to get possessions and some people think I am begging to get drugs, but I am begging to keep warm and get food.”
The council has made a concerted effort to clear encampments from the city centre in recent months, and only a few remain. In March, the police helped clear a large encampment from green space in Cathays Park near the university.
But many rough sleepers say this approach pushes the problem further out, with people now setting up camps in the Cardiff Bay area and around . In February last year, a 19-year-old rough sleeper died while staying in an encampment in woodland near the mouth of the River Taff.
The council says it has started removing tents because they give rough sleepers a false sense of security and claims it wants to encourage them to use support services such as the Huggard day centre, the focal point of care for Cardiff’s homeless people.
“Unfortunately, towards the end of last year as the number of tents in the city centre grew, we noticed a marked decrease in engagement, both with our outreach team and health services. We are very concerned for the welfare and safety of people in tents because of the false sense of security a tent can give someone inside. There have been fires in tents and sadly, a number of deaths as those in crisis are less visible,” a spokesperson said.
They added: “We’ve been encouraged that, according to our latest figures, 64 rough sleepers have taken up offers of accommodation since January, 23 of whom were staying in tents.”
But Paul, who sells the Big Issue in the city centre, says the hostels in Cardiff are not equipped with staff who can deal with some people living there and many feel unsafe.
“I have done the floor space at the Huggard centre, and it had needles everywhere. It’s not a place you would want to be. My mother would not want me to land in a place like that. As far as she knows I am safe, but if I told her where I was living she would be mortified,” he says.
Richard Edwards, chief executive of Huggard, says the rough sleepers are a lot safer there than they are on the street. “The reality is two-thirds of our client group spent time in prison and young offender institutions … so we work with people who can be challenging to services but it is about how you mitigate those risks.
“We have a high staff ratio, security guards in place overnight, and robust policies and procedures to provide a safe environment. It is not ideal but the client group we are working with has complex needs.”
Back on the green outside city hall, the clock is ticking for Ian and Mike. “We are going to try and find somewhere else, try and find a secret place,” the brothers explain, adding that it took them weeks to find their last place, before wandering off into the distance towards a new home for the evening.
