Times have changed since Big Issue launched – and this is how we've moved with them

Christmas threw up something interesting that we had realised only after we launched the Big Issue. It was the idea that homeless people didn’t just need a home. That, as we called it, “Homelessness was the tip of the social iceberg.” It was the presenting problem. It’s what you saw, but it hid a myriad of problems that often started when people who later fell homeless were born. That they inherited poverty and were coming from behind before they even began the human race.

It was interesting finding ourselves in competition against other homeless bodies that kept going on about more hostels, more beds and more rooms for the people caught in homelessness. And us saying that if you don’t sort out the ridiculous situation of housing people but not addressing the issues of how they became homeless they would end up back out on the streets.

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There was a definite revolving door. Most of the people who got put into hostels and used the facilities offered by homeless organisations had been there before, and often on multiple occasions. So people were being kept in an eternal returning.

Unfortunately that is the situation even now, although there is always evidence that people have fallen into homelessness for the first time. But there, on too many occasions, are the seasoned homeless back again, although at times they have been hostelled or housed.

That is why the Big Issue started raising the issue of homeless prevention and homeless cure. We were working in the emergency and we could see how destructive and self-destructive homelessness was for all. We had to try and drag the world towards homeless and poverty prevention. It’s something that we continue to do in our editorial work and with me in parliament.

Now, of course, it is a given that you need to address the reasons why people become homeless. When I say a given I mean that everyone seems to accept it. Each government since has accepted the idea that you cannot just put people in a hostel or a room in a flat and hope for the improvement of their lot. Housing First is one of the major innovations that has grown since our launch in 1991.

• What are the solutions to homelessness?
• Housing First: What can Finland teach us about tackling homelessness?

The idea is so simple and so necessary: you wrap people around with support – social, mental, physical – when you house people. And thankfully the Scottish government has got behind it. Various other authorities are musing on it, and Manchester under Andy Burnham is taking seriously the whole idea of getting the demons out of people’s lives that caused them to fall into the needs of homelessness.

Yet frighteningly many of the frightening realities come back: it is largely a class issue. That people born into poverty that puts people on the back foot at birth need extra help to break that inheritance. Otherwise it is likely to lead to a lifetime of dislocation.

That’s why we need Big Issue even more because we are not seeing a wholesale drive to prevent the occurrence and reoccurrence of poverty inheritance. 

Up until the Big Issue’s first Christmas there was little signs of the public getting behind homeless people. Begging threw up too many problems for people. They were not relating to those in the street. Those begging and asking for alms. And then the Big Issue came along and suddenly people could talk and relate to rough sleepers, hostel dwellers and people in the margins. It was extraordinary how quickly the public bought into the idea that the Big Issue was giving people a legitimate means of making money and therefore they were working and earning their own money.

I don’t think any of us who brought the Big Issue into being ever thought we were challenging the thinking around homelessness – you need more than a home – and allowing the public to support people in the street.

Of course, times have moved on and we have had to innovate. We have had to include people caught in poverty and do more around helping those who are vulnerably accommodated. And if we don’t help them they fall into homelessness. There are deep, deep issues now, post-Brexit, post- the cost of living crisis caused by the Liz Truss regime; by the incredibly mad increase in housing costs and the continuation of the low-wage low-investment economy that we live in.

That the 2008 financial crisis was paid for by squeezing local authorities of their social support money and caused an increase of burdens in the NHS, our schools and other parts of the welfare system. Not to forget the damage done to us by the Covid crisis.

Big Issue itself will have to make major changes in how we work because of the new problems thrown up by new levels of destitution – 33 years is a long time to be on the planet, but still there are big issues needing to be sorted. The biggest problem is the lack of central coordination of government, public and charity coming together to kick a hole in preventing homelessness and the poverty it comes from. It’s still all scattergun and will remain so until government abandons its inherited responses to poverty that have yet to work.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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