Church and State blog: Homeless on the streets of London

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Homeless on the streets of London

Friday, Nov 3 | It is 6.00pm, the first hour we have had to sit down with coffees since arriving in London this morning. We are in a centre for the homeless called Crisis. Having been unable to secure a night shelter for tonight, in four hours Declan and I will be sleeping on the street. Just now I went into the toilet and dumped three-quarters of my rucksack. I can now say that I have truly nothing except the clothes I am wearing, a couple of pairs of stocks, underwear, toothbrush and a military sleeping bag given to me earlier this afternoon. No other way to survive the streets.

In a nutshell, there are day centres which are open at different times around London. I guess some homeless people do the rounds to get out of the cold and the rain. Just one day on the streets and Declan and I know where to go to get free breakfast, good water and even a cup of coffee in the afternoon. We also have the primary libraries in the City of London identified.

We are determined to beat this new way to live that we have been forced into. Lots of lateral thinking is going to be necessary, which I am happy to report Declan and I are very good at. There is really nobody in the world I would choose to go to the street with other than Declan. He is full of resources, well-travelled and very good on the phone! No wonder we are being closely policed; not difficult though, when you consider there are not many possibilities when someone has little money, no place to sleep and few places to get into. I should mention here that yesterday, before leaving Birmingham, Declan received a letter from the court manager in the High Court of Justice Administrative Court here in London, informing him that at a hearing on 11 December Mr Justice Collins will reconsider his decision of 13 October to deny us permission to apply for judicial review against the Department for Work and Pensions. We've got to survive being homeless until then. Didn't Declan request on 24 August an urgent judicial review? Somehow I don't think that we're supposed to survive that long. The British government (any government really) has so many resources at its disposal to take out any inconvenience that it's hard to believe individuals without money or power broke through in the pre-internet era.

We have been told by two advisers in two different day centres that because Declan's joint claim for unemployment benefit has been terminated (because he did not sign on two days before he was supposed to), we are not entitled to Housing Benefit; and most night shelters are not interested in people without it. Choices are slim after that. Rolling night shelters (different church halls that rotate on a weekly basis) are run between the end of November and March and are mostly full of people who are not accepted by night shelters because of addictions and the like. Most night shelters that do not require Housing Benefit are government owned and only accept people sleeping rough that have been referred to them by a Contact and Assessment Team (CAT). A CAT from one of the homeless charities visits people sleeping rough when they are bedded down with a view to referring them to a night shelter, if possible.

Having arrived in London by bus this morning at 5.30am, we were first referred by the Methodist-run Whitechapel Mission to the Catholic Sisters of Mercy-run Dellow Centre. The Dellow Centre told us we should probably make our way to Victoria Station, where it might be safer for us to sleep. We arrived there almost out of breath and went straight into The Passage day centre, which is run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul and Westminster Cathedral. An advisor there told us we had no connections in London and therefore could not access their services. We were advised to jump on a bus immediately - coincidently from Victoria Station - and return to Birmingham. When we mentioned our right of free movement within the EU, the advisor got very defensive and told us that no CAT visits rough sleepers around Victoria Station on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

So we are supposed to return Birmingham! Getting the picture, we made our way back to the Dellow Centre. This time we arrived at the Centre with the address of a patch nearby that we had chosen for the night. They took the details for a Thames Reach rescue team to visit us between 11.00pm and 4.00am.

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Saturday, Nov 4 | It is now about 1.00am. Declan is sleeping beside me in our patch while I am here writing on our first night as homeless people. I couldn't really sleep without mentioning the experience of walking to Trafalgar Square earlier tonight and queuing with over 150 homeless people in the cold to be given some hot food from a van. Declan got information on food that will be handy for the weekend. By 10.00pm we were back at our patch. It is quite cold now, although the army sleeping bags we were given yesterday are providing some protection. I'm sure no CAT will visit us.

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It's 7.00am. We're back at the Whitechapel Mission. Just to confirm that no CAT visited us last night. At 5.00am we woke so cold that we decided to make our way to the Mission, the only homeless centre in London that opens at 6.00am for free coffee and biscuits. It was pitch dark when we started out. Next week the weather is expected to take a turn for the worse. Tonight we will get some cardboard to sleep on from a place nearby our patch. Not only are we to be homeless, but we must sleep rough as well. Perhaps tonight the police will tell us to move on. The unaccountability is bottomless.

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

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[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

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Saturday, November 04, 2006

Homeless on the streets of London

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