The complexity of helping people off the streets
5 August 2025
Written by Chief Executive Bill Tidnam, reflecting on a recent outreach shift and the challenges faced in supporting people off the streets
A couple of months ago, I joined an outreach shift with one of our teams working with people sleeping rough in a North London borough. It was a lovely spring morning, and the early dawn meant that, with a 7 am start, the shift was in daylight. The team is commissioned by the local authority, who have recently opened an ‘assessment centre’ to work closely with the outreach team to provide a first step off the streets for people who are sleeping rough in the borough. As ever, I was impressed with the patience and persistence of our staff and depressed by the unintentional barriers to the work that they do.
We spent the first part of the shift checking known rough sleeping sites across the borough, finding some people who were already known to the team, reminding them of appointments and encouraging them to take up offers of accommodation. Others didn’t want to speak to us, but we were able to leave our contact details and tell them that we would be back at another time. At other places, it was clear that someone had slept there that night but had gone for the day. This is routine outreach work—persistently breaking down barriers, building trust, maintaining contact, and using this to help people move away from homelessness.
Later in the shift, we drove to a residential cul-de-sac and parked, then walked down an alley that took us under a dual carriageway. The outreach workers I was with were looking for a notice that would tell them the number of the bridge and who owned it, but we couldn’t see anything. The concrete wall beside the path had a metal door that had once been locked, but which now stood ajar. It led into a large, dark space under the road. In the other wall was a further doorway, and the ground was piled with cans and plastic bags, in between which were tents and sleeping sites made of pallets and tarpaulins. The concrete walls were blackened with smoke where people had lit fires to cook or to keep warm. As our eyes got used to the gloom, we could see rats ambling confidently around the far wall.
In all, about ten people were sleeping there—a group of seven who were in a tight group, and three others in separate groups. Most people were known to the outreach workers, and we were able to remind people of appointments to help get an ID, and in one case, that there was a space for them in the local assessment centre.
One of the group was new to the workers. He didn’t speak much English, but we were able to communicate using a combination of Google Translate and others in the group. He told us that he’d been there for a couple of weeks. He had had a rented place in the neighbouring borough, and he’d been working, but he got ill and had to go to the hospital for a couple of weeks. He told us that his landlord had changed the locks and thrown away his belongings. When he left the hospital, he had nowhere to go and had joined his friends under the road. He showed his medication and told us that he needed to pick up a new prescription from his GP.
This should have been straightforward—he had a clear connection to the borough where he had lived, and that borough has an assessment centre, which would provide emergency accommodation until longer-term housing could be sorted out. On the face of it, he’d been illegally evicted by his landlord and, unlike many of the people sleeping in that space, he had no barriers to claiming the benefits that would help pay his rent.
He didn’t want to stay where he was, and he knew that he needed to find safe accommodation, but he was adamant that he wouldn’t return to the neighbouring borough, and that he wanted to stay in the borough he was now in. The problem was that the local borough would identify his connection with the neighbouring borough and would insist they were the ones who had a duty to help him.
This is difficult territory for our staff, and the danger is that he will stay where he is until something changes—his health gets a lot worse, the people he knows move away, or the owner of the space decides to secure it.
Clearly, there was more to this story than we knew, or he was telling us. This story does two things: it illustrates the complexity and ambivalence experienced by outreach workers as they try to get people off the streets, as well as the judgements made by the people they are trying to help, who are trying to weigh up different issues and sometimes come to decisions that we would regard as unwise.
It also points to a disconnect in the way services work in London, with its thirty-three local authorities, where cash-strapped councils can prioritise the protection of ‘their’ scarce resources (hostels, access to housing and so on) for ‘their’ people, which means that some people spend longer on the streets. There’s a need for more, but there is also a need to look at our emergency response and think about how councils can better share the resources they have, so that these conversations about connection and responsibility can happen in a place that is safe, rather than in a smoke-blackened concrete bunker under a dual carriageway.
Donate today
Your support can help people sleeping rough to escape the streets for good.