When I turn up at work there, waiting for me as he does every morning, is Bob. Every day he is the first at the door for breakfast. I manage a small, independent homeless charity helping rough sleepers to access accommodation – not an easy task.
I say good morning, ask him how his night went, and let him in. As I watch him make himself a cup of tea, I feel sad. Sad because it’s now more than a month since he left prison. In that time everyday he has been the first in for breakfast, and every night he has slept rough.
I can’t find him housing because he is a convicted arsonist with mental health problems. It is hard enough to find accommodation for someone without his complexities and I feel for the staff in the housing advice team at the local authority. They do their best but have their hands tied by rules and regulations. We don’t advise anyone we think is “single, non-priority homeless” to go to the council. There’s no point and it simply wastes everyone’s time.
Arsonist or not, Bob is still a human being. He wants to be warm and dry, he wants to have food to eat without asking for handouts, and above all he wants somewhere to call home.
Many people will be surprised to learn that it is harder to find accommodation for arsonists than it is for sex offenders. Sex offenders can be monitored, supervised and controlled, but it is hard to monitor someone who starts fires.
No-one wants to take the risk of offering him accommodation. Imagine the media storm if the council housed a convicted arsonist in a block of flats and a fire was started and someone was injured. My organisation is just as guilty: we provide a night shelter but for Bob and people like him, all we offer is a safe place to go to during the day.
But the biggest issue is his mental health. Did this lead to his offence? Or is it a result of the clear trauma the incident caused? Our problem is that because he regularly fails to attend appointments, the local mental health team has closed his case and so there is no way of answering these questions.
So Bob slips through the cracks in the system and I wonder what will become of him. Is he going to be left to wither and die in the cycle of homelessness and mental health? Will he be overlooked and ignored until there is an incident?
All of us where I work will try to support him in the best way we know. Yet it feels like the blind leading the blind; we are not qualified clinicians or experts in any field.
Cuts made to statutory services over many years have moved the goalposts; the criteria for support is so high that Bob does not qualify. We are supporting more and more people who, just five years ago, would have received help via the Adult Social Care budget. This has been pared back so far that a choice is made on who is worthy enough to be supported.
We are a jack of all trades and definitely master of none and we quickly fall into the trap of using ‘in’ terms such as complex need and high risk almost as an excuse to explain why we don’t do the one thing that is needed – give Bob a bed. We label him like everyone else does so we don’t have to see the individual behind the label.
We dehumanise the situation and make it more palatable for us to live with. Labels are so easy to throw about. They land conveniently on the shoulders of those we want to keep in a box. Challenging, attention seeking and damaged are common labels and we stop seeing the person and instead see a problem which we feel the need to contain. Eventually the person labelled loses sight of themselves just as we lose sight of them.
I recently overheard a colleague say “it would be better if Bob went back to prison as winter is coming”. This is both sad and true. There is no money to help people like Bob – the pot of creativity for new initiatives that exists in the sector is vast but yet again lack of resources prevent them from getting any further than an idea. More than ever, contracts link money to outcomes, and outcomes seem to be all about numbers.
Most days I question my career choice. If it wasn’t for those I meet in my daily role, I would have moved on years ago. They know that they can reduce our funding and we will still keep trying to deliver the best possible service and fund it with events like quiz nights and sponsored sleep outs, which none of us get paid for – anything to keep helping those who need us.
Yes, Bob does set fires and has problems but everyone forgets that he is also a man who has talents and who is polite, helpful, funny and incredibly resilient. So, tomorrow I will lay money on the fact that Bob will be first at the door waiting for me to let him in for breakfast.
• Name has been changed.
This series aims to give a voice to the staff behind the public services that are hit by mounting cuts and rising demand, and so often denigrated by the press, politicians and public. If you would like to write an article for the series, contact kirstie.brewer@theguardian.com
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