REBECCA RONCORONI WRITES: At this time of year, with Christmas approaching, the homeless, mainly rough sleepers, become a topic of concern. Crisis shelters are opened, a Christmas dinner provided, and everyone feels a bit better about celebrating Christmas themselves, safe in the knowledge that for a few days at least, no one is going to freeze to death.

But, I can’t help wondering why it is only at Christmas the homeless are collectively cared about enough to ensure they are safe for a few paltry days.

What about the rest of the year? What about the rest of the homeless languishing on waiting lists in crappy bed and breakfasts, hostels or mates’ sofas, with little hope of getting secure, affordable housing that is suitable for their needs? Is it possible that, society doesn’t really care about the homeless at all? That the Christmas shelters are simply there to show that, as a society, we can show charity to those who many believe, are really just feckless and totally to blame for their own situation, that homelessness is a ‘lifestyle choice’?

Here on our Island, we have around 1,800 applicants on the social housing waiting list bidding every week for a handful of properties that become vacant.

Out of the five bands successful applicants are placed in, being homeless is only a band four, nearly bottom priority and unlikely to be allocated a property any time soon. To be accepted as an applicant is not easy. Hoops must be jumped through, judgments, some subjective, made. If you are deemed ‘intentionally homeless’ forget it. Intentionally homeless could be eviction due to rent arrears, which on the face of it seems reasonable, until you hear the stories about benefit sanctions, caps, delays or illnesses that have led to the arrears in the first place. Vital services, such as the Island Law Centre, help people to avoid eviction with a 98 per cent success rate. Their funding is being cut by the IW Council in 2019. Another door closes. This is the same council, that while holding no housing stock itself, still has a housing department whose sole job is to act as a ‘gate keeper’. Gatekeeper in this instance seems translate as finding any reason at all to keep people off the waiting list.

People are placed into a Catch 22 situation, hammered by the very systems that are supposed to be there as a safety net.

In 1980, there were six million council houses, now there are fewer than two million. What’s left is still being sold off.

Meanwhile services that support our vulnerable are being cut to the bone, affordable housing is non-existent for those on minimum wage or benefits and the increasingly nasty rhetoric being touted is this is all down to individual choice. Really? 

Where are people supposed to live, and what on?  How have things become so skewed that rats have more freedom and choice to make a home for their families in our communities than people?

Christmas shelters are the equivalent of throwing people a fish. They need fishing rods.

What is happening right now is taking us back to Dickensian times.

Maybe we should borrow that famous RSPCA tagline about dogs and remember that people are for life not just for Christmas.