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'We slowly build a rapport': how street buddies connect with rough sleepers

A freezing wind is whipping through London’s Victoria as Tim Joyce and Gerry O’Brien approach two rough sleepers huddled in sleeping bags on the pavement outside a branch of the Halifax bank. A few doors along police and private security guards hustle other homeless people out of doorways, sending one running into the traffic in his socks. Another flees towards the station, duvet flapping.

Joyce and O’Brien, both charity workers, want to help people off the streets, but their tactics differ dramatically from those of the police and many other homelessness charities.

The pair used to sleep rough and beg, and now they try to use their experience to reach the most hardened cases. O’Brien, 51, spent years as a drug addict and petty criminal, while Joyce, 52, slept on the streets of Canning Town, London, after losing his job, his mother and a premature baby before trying to kill himself.

They are employed as “street buddies” under an initiative run by the Riverside housing charity which is being expanded into neighbouring Kensington and Chelsea and other London boroughs, at a time when Britain’s rough sleeping crisis appears to be getting worse.

It is one of many different approaches to helping rough sleepers, who number nearly 25,000 in England, according to data obtained by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act. That figure is five times higher than the government’s estimate from 2018.

The housing ministry is due to release annual rough sleeping data on Thursday and it is expected to show a decrease.

But the government’s chief statistician, David Norgrove, said last year that the last round of figures “should not be used to draw firm conclusions” because of a change in counting methods. Labour has called for an investigation into the accuracy of the government’s rough sleeping statistics.

In contrast with “housing first”, a strategy underpinning the government’s latest plan to “end rough sleeping” which sets out to tackle addiction and mental health problems only after a rough sleeper has been brought “inside”, the Street Buddies scheme tries to build a slower rapport with the most entrenched rough sleepers in the belief that a sudden removal from the streets does not always work.

“A lot of people don’t want to connect,” says O’Brien, who turned to begging after a criminal career peddling hashish and stealing bikes, particularly those parked by barristers around the Temple legal district. “They just want to escape. When an outreach worker approaches them they are not ready to come in. All we have to offer is a coffee and a word and the slow process of building up trust.”

Now sober after years as a heroin and crack addict, O’Brien walks the streets to talk with the most hardened rough sleepers a few times a week in the mornings or at bedding down times.

“I will never say ‘I was like you’,” he says. “That’s annoying. I will slowly tell them about myself. I remember what it is like to be addicted, so we slowly build a rapport up. I might come out with something like, ‘I am a smackhead crackhead and you are a crackhead smackheadz’.”

His point is that a fellow addict will know what he means: one uses heroin first and then takes crack to bring themselves back up, while the other uses heroin to ease them off the crack high. His junkie vocabulary (“shoelace suckers” for heroin users who nod forward, or “prang” for the paranoia that can follow a crack high) also helps build a rapport that outreach staff cannot achieve.

Outreach workers are often seen as the enemy, Joyce says. “I say ‘my name is Tim, I am not an outreach worker’.”

After five minutes of kneeling down alongside the two rough sleepers outside the Halifax, the pair feel a connection has been made. “I related to them on the black and the white,” says O’Brien, referring to heroin and crack. “He said he wanted £4 to get going [buy drugs]. I said I can’t help you with that but I remember when I was begging at Old Street I needed £15 to get one and one [packets of heroin and crack].”

The rough sleepers had explained they were sleeping outside the Halifax branch and were reluctant to go to the local homeless shelter. O’Brien says he understands because “addiction wants you on your own”.

“I told him I was four years down the line from them and he opened up,” Joyce added. “Within five minutes I have connected with two people who have asked me for help. It is the start of getting someone indoors.” He will be seeing them again for coffee in the coming days.

Street Buddies are called in when an outreach worker finds they cannot make a connection. Riverside believes that almost one in three of the rough sleepers their buddies engage with eventually go inside.

“If someone has been rough sleeping for a long time, there can be a lot of complex factors stopping them from rebuilding their lives,” says Kim Taylor-Smith, the lead member for housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which is spending £56,000 on launching a programme similar to Westminster’s. “Street Buddies volunteers understand this.”

One of the men Joyce has helped is Jim Kelly, 60, an Irishman whose construction and property business collapsed in the 2009 financial crash. By 2018 he was sleeping on the steps of Hinde Street Methodist church, in Marylebone, London. He was attacked four times but didn’t want to go indoors. There was no connection with charity workers, he says. Some were “pushy”.

“We knew Jim didn’t want to come in,” says Joyce, who simply took him for weekly breakfasts. Eventually he was housed.

The Street Buddies face difficulties too. “Eighty per cent of the people in Westminster want to be homeless,” Joyce claims. “They get treated well to the extent that people don’t want to eat Pret A Manger [but seek better food handouts]. You get given clothes, there is a bed for everyone. If you sit on the street, people just give you money. It’s a paradise for homeless people.” While Westminster has the highest number of rough sleepers in the country it is also well-served by homelessness charities.

Moving from begging to universal credit is also unappealing. Joyce says the reality is often £10 a day to live on, which he says could be earned from begging in 30 minutes. “It is much harder getting people off the streets than you think,” he says.