Andy Burnham Wants to End Rough Sleeping. But First We Need to Understand Homelessness From the Inside Out

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made ending rough sleeping one of his first priorities in government and, as someone who has actually experienced homelessness, slept rough, begged on the streets and lived the reality behind the statistics, I genuinely welcome that commitment.

For far too long homelessness has been treated as something we manage rather than something we prevent, and although getting people into safe and secure housing absolutely has to be part of the solution, I believe there is another conversation we desperately need to have if we are serious about ending rough sleeping in the UK. We need to understand how somebody gets there in the first place, because nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly becomes the person you walk past sitting in a doorway. There is usually a story before the street, and I know that because I had one.

Andy Burnham’s Plan to End Rough Sleeping

On his first day as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham announced a national drive to end rough sleeping, and that commitment matters because nobody should be sleeping on the streets in this country. We need safe and secure housing, accessible support, proper investment, mental health services, trauma informed services and earlier intervention, but alongside all of those things I believe we need something that costs absolutely nothing and yet is so often missing from conversations about homelessness: understanding.

If we do not understand what pushes people towards homelessness, we will forever be trying to fix the crisis after it has already happened. We can move somebody from a pavement into accommodation, and of course that matters, but unless we understand what happened before the pavement and what support that person might need afterwards, we risk dealing with the visible outcome without addressing everything underneath it.

I Know What Homelessness Looks Like From the Inside

There was a time when people walked past me and saw a homeless woman. They saw addiction, they saw somebody begging and they saw my behaviour, and some of them probably wondered why I could not just sort myself out. What they did not see was everything that had happened before I reached that point. They did not see the childhood trauma, the care system, abuse, domestic violence or mental health struggles, and they did not understand the addiction or recognise the opportunities where the right intervention at the right time might have changed the direction of my life.

The person sitting in the doorway in front of you is still a person. They have a name, a history and a life that existed before you saw them sitting there. They have probably loved somebody, lost somebody or experienced things you know absolutely nothing about. Homelessness is something somebody is experiencing at that point in their life. It is not who they are, and it should never become their entire identity simply because that is the part of their story we happen to see.

When Homelessness Becomes Social Media Content

There is another conversation I believe we need to have, and that is about the way homelessness is increasingly being used for social media content. We have all seen the videos where a content creator approaches somebody experiencing homelessness while the camera is already recording, gives them food or money, captures their emotional reaction and then uploads that vulnerable moment for thousands or sometimes millions of people to watch.

I am not saying we should not help people because of course we should, and I would never want somebody to walk past a person who needs help because they are worried about doing the wrong thing. What I do think we need to ask ourselves is who that moment is actually helping, because there is a difference between genuinely raising awareness about homelessness and using somebody else’s vulnerability to generate views, engagement and followers.

People experiencing homelessness deserve dignity, privacy and respect just like everybody else. If somebody genuinely wants to help another human being, that kindness does not become less valuable because nobody filmed it. In fact, sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is help somebody without expecting anything from them in return, including a reaction that can be shared online.

How Can Society Help People Experiencing Homelessness?

You do not need to be Prime Minister and you do not need thousands of pounds to make a difference, because sometimes change begins with something as simple as changing the way we see people. Make eye contact rather than pretending somebody is invisible, speak to people like human beings and choose compassion before judgement because you have no idea what happened before somebody reached that pavement.

We can support organisations doing the long term work because emergency help matters, but prevention, housing and sustained support matter too. We can educate ourselves about the relationship between homelessness, trauma, addiction, poverty, domestic abuse, care experience and mental health, because understanding those connections can completely change the way we respond to somebody who is struggling.

We can also challenge the stereotypes that still surround homelessness. Words matter and the way we talk about people influences the way society treats them. We can think before filming somebody at an incredibly vulnerable point in their life and ask ourselves whether the world really needs to watch us helping them, and we can start putting as much energy into preventing homelessness as we do responding to it once somebody is already sleeping outside.

Ending Rough Sleeping Must Include Lived Experience

If Andy Burnham’s government is serious about ending rough sleeping, I believe people with lived experience need to be part of the national conversation, and I do not mean simply inviting people into rooms to tell a sad story or using their experiences as case studies. Lived experience is knowledge, and people who have been through homelessness understand things that statistics and reports simply cannot tell you.

We know what services feel like from the other side of the desk. We know how it feels when somebody actually listens to you and we know how it feels when nobody does. We understand how complicated somebody’s life can become long before the point where the rest of society finally notices there is a problem.

Lived experience does not replace professional expertise and I would never suggest that it should. What it does is add another form of knowledge to that expertise, and when the two are brought together properly I believe we have a much better chance of creating services and policies that understand the human being rather than simply responding to the problem.

Why I Created Homelessness Inside Out

Everything I have lived through is why I created Homelessness Inside Out, an interactive online learning experience designed to help people understand homelessness beyond statistics and stereotypes. This is not simply something you sit and read before ticking a box to say you have completed it. I want people to take part, think, reflect and question some of the assumptions we have all been taught about homelessness.

Through lived experience, real life scenarios and guided reflection, I want professionals and members of the public to think differently about what homelessness actually looks like and how somebody can reach that point. More than anything, I want us to stop seeing “the homeless” as though we are talking about a separate group of people and start seeing human beings who are experiencing homelessness.

If Britain really is going to make ending rough sleeping a national priority, then I hope we use this moment to have a much bigger conversation than simply how we get people off the pavement. We need to talk about why people reached it, what could have happened earlier, trauma, prevention, dignity, what happens after somebody is housed and, most importantly, we need to listen to people who know what homelessness actually feels like from the inside.

That is the conversation I want Homelessness Inside Out to start, because if we genuinely want to end homelessness, we cannot only understand what we can see from the outside. We need to understand what happens before somebody reaches the street, what happens while they are there and what they need to rebuild afterwards.

We need to understand homelessness from the inside out.