We recently suffered a bereavement, a homeless man Sylvester Menzelevski who had a wife and two children back in Poland. He died in a fire in a derelict building where he and others had been living in squalid conditions. He was 35.  

We were particularly moved because Nightwatch was started after the death from exposure of a homeless man in Croydon in the 1970s. Local people got together to take what action they could against homelessness in the borough. They sought out homeless people living in squats, car parks, stations, found out what they wanted, and organised services for them. Within ten years the homeless population was down to less than a handful. 

Now the sort of squalor we used to see in the 1970s is back with a vengeance. People are living in garages with mattresses thrown on the ground, with no running water or electricity, a danger to their own health and that of their neighbours.

Government figures say there has been a doubling in the number of street homeless in London in five years and the figure is climbing. I have certainly seen that on the ground. This time just last year I was seeing an average of 60 people a night coming for food, now it is an average of 90. We provide food, sometimes the only food people have eaten all day, clothing, household goods for those who can use them; recycled furniture for former homeless people to resettle them in new accommodation, and protective working clothes to help people who are looking for work. Perhaps most importantly, we always there, a constant, reliable presence in lives which are often chaotic.

So that’s us. But what happened to these homeless figures? We had been promised an end to street homelessness referred to as ‘rough sleeping,’ by the end of 2012. No One Left Out, the national policy, was a top-down model, set up by ‘local authorities, leading charities and central government.’ It was presented as a definitive solution.

It was believed that given the funding and the right number of administrators, homelessness could be managed away.

I feel that part of the failure of the current policy is contained in the very use of the term ‘rough sleeping’. It is a description of those categorised as a nuisance, as if sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice, a decision personally made. Here are the visible homeless, take them away from their park bench or garage or wherever they are, put them in a hostel, and we have no more homeless. Like most simple solutions to complex problems, it does not bear scrutiny.

It in fact is not only the visible, those sleeping in shop doorways and park benches who are homeless. Sometimes the same people will be homeless on the streets on some days of the week, and in some kind of accommodation on another. Homelessness is a fluid state. I knew a man who could stay with a friend during the week but at the weekend his friend’s girlfriend was there and he moved out to give them some privacy. So how should he be described, three sevenths a rough sleeper?

When I take out students and other interested people out on our nightly runs I always ask: How was it for you? Is it what you expected? They so often show surprise at how normal the homeless are, they are ‘just like ordinary people.’

That is why the ‘rough sleeping’ theory of homelessness does not work - there is no disease entity or personality trait you can isolate and treat to prevent repeat homelessness. The homeless are us, just with less money. And more problems, you might wish to say. Well, actually, no. All the problems I have encountered with homelessness - drug addiction, domestic violence, marriage break ups, alcoholism - I have also found in middle class families. The middle class just conceal it better, and when something goes wrong, they have a bigger, softer, richer safety net to protect them. Substance abuse for example doesn’t cause homelessness; there are plenty of people using drink and drugs and making a very good living, thank you, in law, politics, the media. I have met very few middle class homeless people, only one teacher and one airline pilot in decades of volunteering.

The national overview is that central government told local government to have a policy on homelessness, and local government contracted out their responsibilities over to the private organisations they like to work with: the ones that mirror their power, finance and career structures. Some are charities but they behave more like companies.

The people who run these services are not ill-intentioned and certainly help some clients. 

However, I have been troubled by the correspondence between the way in which the best help they could give was, also, the most expensive procedure: engaging the largest amount of property the largest number of staff.  

The procedure they created relied on homeless people staying in one place, linked to a benefits system where they claim from the address of the hostel. The hostel, and the organisation that owns it, is funded from these benefit claims. When a new resident comes in, someone will sit down with them, and whatever their need is: reconnection with their family, loneliness, substance abuse, the one piece of help they will always get is filling in the housing benefit form. Every person is claiming between one and two hundred pounds a week on benefits for a hostel room. So the system is based on a money supply of housing benefits. It has, effectively, monetised homelessness.

If they were fully effective, and clients were in and out in six weeks, this might not be a disaster. But I see a lot of residents of hostels on a soup run because they are not in and out fast, I see people coming out for food who have been in hostels for five or seven years.  

I should add that not all homeless people are equal, many are rejected from access to hostels with the dreaded appellation No Recourse To Public Funds. That means they don’t have the right to access benefits, they are the most unwanted among the homeless, those who cannot be monetised. Sleeping out alone does not qualify them.

The system requires a supply of paid workers to run it, yet in more than thirty years of volunteering with Nightwatch, of the many things I have heard homeless people say about their needs, I am still waiting to hear one say ‘If only I had the services of just one more trained key worker I could really turn my life around.’

As hostels have increased in number in my experience they have not increased in quality. The best are very good, the worst are dens of bullying and drug dealing. The things residents tell me suggest the worst outnumber the best. Nor is the success rate even remarkably good: one set of outcome figures states a third of people are discharged and back on the streets because of bad behaviour, or whatever. A third go on to their own accommodation, which is a success; and a third are discharged to other hostels - which also goes down in the figures as a success. But that’s the best the hostels can do for all the money: a third get better, a third get worse and a third stay the same.    

Between them government, housing charities and the housing market have created a world in which it is not possible to be poor and recognised as such - you must be in receipt of hundreds of pounds of benefits to afford even a room in a hostel. It was actually easier to be a homeless person in this country when George Orwell was down and out in London in the 1930s. He would be able to stay in Rowton House or other shelters for the night. The official, London County Council figures for a street count in February 1931 were 78 people sleeping out, fewer than a hundred. There were a couple of thousand others who otherwise would have been on the streets, but they were in overnight shelters. Just for comparison, in the (admittedly much larger) London of today, official figures say 6,437 people are out annually.

Being stuck in one place, tied to a hostel linked to the benefits system, means people are not able therefore to take advantage, for example, of seasonal work in coastal towns or agricultural areas: they cannot tramp around looking for work. I recently gave a Czech man a pair of boots he had asked for so he could walk from south London to East Anglia to do farm labouring work.  

The most difficult thing I have to do as someone who sees street homeless people at night regularly is to tell someone who is going to sleep out that there is nowhere for them to go. There is no open access shelter, that people could just walk in to, by self referral without the intervention of a gatekeeper asking for the benefit cheque. You have to apply for a hostel place Monday to Friday during office hours.  

When I ask what homeless people themselves want they say a warm dry place to stay for the night, where they won’t be attacked by thugs. Somewhere to sleep, something to eat, washing facilities.  

Sometimes, in recent years, I have been able to tell them there is such a place. In a spontaneous response to the crisis of homelessness, local churches have opened their doors to provide floating shelters. In London, where this activity was particularly successful, out of 32 boroughs, 26 had shelters this winter.

Every year in winter, churches and other groups around the country set up these cold weather shelters, normally a different church or other location each night. It is along the pattern of soup runs and drop ins, volunteers from the community doing what they can to address an obvious need. Two things characterise these organisations and distinguish them from existing provision: they are mainly or entirely run by volunteers; and they are naturally generated from the community they serve, a bottom-up model. Where local government has been involved it has been with an enabling function - cutting through red tape to allow premises to be used.

A way forward in homelessness would be for government, including local government, to work with these services, helping to provide open access homeless shelters all the year round, that would be supported by faith and other organisations in the community. They would be basic with sleeping, washing and laundry facilities. This would not rule out professional intervention for people who want to address their problems, they could go to a specialist hostel, but shelters should be the first resort. This model of open access shelters has been tried and tested. The good will and willingness to volunteer to help is immeasurable - we turn volunteers away, we have so many people wanting to help.   

In the near future there will be many more homeless people because of problems associated with the recession, benefit cuts, people moving for work, including moving from other countries. We will need to face that crisis by mobilising the community. 

I don’t want more homeless people bedding down in wretched conditions or dying in them like Sylvester.

If the government has taken any measures to reduce harm to sex workers, it is not apparent to me. ‘Harm’ is built in to the system. The current position of semi-criminalisation of an otherwise legal act is absurd, unworkable and it prevents sex workers from enjoying the protection of the law as it is available to other citizens.

The sale of sex itself is not illegal but the advertising of the service and any activity involving more than one sex worker on the same premises is. This means sex workers cannot enjoy the psychological and practical support of colleagues on the same premises without breaking the law. A ban on advertising (contemptuously called ‘soliciting’) stigmatises an activity which, without such attitudes, would be innocent.

Workers in this sector can be the victims of violence, coercion and fraud. This makes them not unlike workers in many other fields. However, the criminalisation of sex work means they have little or no recourse to the law. It is sometimes the case that even when an attack is reported, police will then seek to prosecute the women themselves for such ‘crimes’ as running a brothel. 

The criminalisation of sex work renders the activity more covert and so it is a contributory factor to criminal activity in the sex industry. That is: even people who have no criminal intent and no other relationship with crime, become criminalised because of the law relating to an activity which is not, in itself, offensive.

There needs to be no more regulation of sex work than that of people running a beauty salon or a hairdresser. They should have the usual legal protections of employment law, consumer protection and hygiene.

Decriminalisation would allow openness of reporting and mutual help for sex workers. People could advertise their services according to the usual standards of advertising, could work in a safe and supportive environment and could expect the same protection from the law that any shopkeeper receives.

To reduce harm the government should change existing legislation so that soliciting is no longer an offence and brothel-keeping laws allow sex workers to share premises, without losing the ability to prosecute those who use brothels to control or exploit sex workers.  

The criminalisation of sex work is itself a bar to leaving the industry because convictions make it hard to be employed at anything else. Government should legislate to delete previous convictions and cautions for prostitution from the record of sex workers, as these records make it difficult for people to move out of prostitution into other forms of work if they wish to do so.

Sex has always been bought and sold, and always will be. Sometimes the stakes are very high such as marriage for gain, what Mary Wollstonecraft called ‘legalised prostitution.’ The position of women involved in prostitution would be improved immeasurably if the stigma of uncleanliness were removed from them. Like the market for hairdressers or beauticians, the existence of a market for sexual services affects only those involved in it except that, in the case of sex workers, they are treated as outcasts because of the behaviour of moralists towards them. This is only a matter of fashion. Actresses used to be considered by their nature immoral; now renowned actresses sit in the House of Lords. This is not because of a change in the nature of acting, but attitudes towards it.

Access to healthcare services is constrained by the expectation of some providers that the best they can do for sex workers is get them out of sex work. This is of course fine if that is the sex worker’s wish, but welfare services should not be predicated on that basis, they should be available to all. The best local services offer supplies (lubricants, condoms) which implies they are not taking a moralistic attitude to the work. The necessity of working alone in a property, and the ban on advertising, because of the law, makes it difficult for welfare services to contact sex workers. 

The self-righteousness of proponents of the Nordic laws reflect the origin of their thinking in the Victorian model of ‘saving’ fallen woman. They start from a premise that sex work is by its nature immoral, and that no woman who ever does it is acting as a free agent (for no woman could ever willingly embrace such immorality). It conflates the genuinely pernicious activities of trafficking and forced prostitution with the free sale of a sexual service. It infantalises women and denies them agency. Criminalising clients makes it more difficult for sex workers to do background checks on them and forces sex workers into making quick decisions which could lead them into dangerous situations.

On the issue of equality: discussion is usually exclusively limited to women supplying sexual services to men. Other areas should be considered: the sale of sexual services by men to women is an expanding sector now that sufficient numbers of women have the autonomy and the disposable income to choose to pay for sex when they require it. Any proposals for legislation should cover male as well as female prostitutes, in homosexual as well as heterosexual encounters. There is a significant presence of transwomen involved in sex work also, any proposals should not discriminate over gender or sex.