Swept under the park bench: the cruel fate of Hackney’s homeless people

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/05/homelessness-unequal-society-hackney-council

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The philosopher Jeremy Bentham said: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Tension between respect for individual freedom and the greater good is nothing new – it is the bread and butter of lawmaking. Getting the balance right isn’t always easy. Nevertheless, there are occasions when decisions are morally inexcusable.

Earlier this year, the London borough of Hackney found itself walking this tricky tightrope, settling down, as institutions are wont to do, on the side of the many. It got it wrong. Invoking new powers under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act of 2014, Hackney council made a public spaces protection order (PSPO) banning, among other things, begging, loitering and sleeping rough within designated areas.

A person acting in breach of the PSPO can be given an immediate £100 penalty, and receive a further £1,000 fine and a criminal record. Yes, you read that right: fines and possible imprisonment for nothing more than standing around. For a supposedly caring council, this tactic is oddly reminiscent of those employed by totalitarian states.

Unsurprisingly, Hackney has come under fire for its decision. The musician Ellie Goulding tweeted her “disgust” this week, encouraging her 4.8 million followers to sign a 76,000-strong petition demanding the council stop criminalising Hackney’s rough sleepers.

Recognising that their decision has caused some “significant concern”, Hackney has sought to explain itself. An update on the council’s website informs that the aim isn’t to criminalise the homeless, arguing that enforcement is, in fact, “a last resort”. Rather the PSPO has been designed to: “tackle a handful of entrenched rough sleepers who have repeatedly and over a long period resisted all attempts to house them and help them, and who are causing serious problems for other residents with antisocial behaviour including drug use, drunkenness, public urination and defecation, and threatening behaviour.” The council adds that “The point of this is to push people into treatment and if necessary [seeking] injunctions rather than [fines]”.

Society’s richest can play fast and loose with the nation’s purse strings and everyone else foots the bill

What if injunctions are repeatedly breached? Well, then, prison it will be. And so we return to Bentham. For the council, everyone’s needs are being adequately addressed and the greatest happiness has necessarily been achieved. Those too far gone, disengaged from civic pride and respectability, will have to sacrifice the “freedom” of sleeping on exposed concrete. Not the type that is practically de rigueur in Hackney’s bespoke kitchens, no: more the cold, dirty kind considered an open invitation for some to piss on you while you’re sleeping because society hasn’t done enough already to make you believe in your worthlessness.

The greater good is, apparently, ensuring everyone else can urbanely carry their takeaway coffees unsullied by a glimpse into how terribly wrong life can turn out to be for our fellow human beings. Discomfort is a terrible thing.

In some ways, the council’s vision is one straight out of utopian fantasy: no one should be homeless; no one should experience pain and turmoil so great that self-destruction becomes a safety blanket. It is a happy landscape free from social inequality and injustice.

In this imaginary homeland, coercing people into wanting change is fine because the alternative – continuing their own annihilation in a vastly unequal society – doesn’t exist. But then, that isn’t the real world.

Here, sadly, society’s richest can play fast and loose with the nation’s purse strings and everyone else foots the bill, thanks to this thing called austerity. Sleeping rough in England has risen by 55% since 2010 and 79% in London – it is absolutely the result of cuts to public services.

It is also worth noting that the council is exercising extra powers introduced by a government aggressively diminishing public spending. Where once the police would have dealt with such instances of antisocial behaviour, now local authorities are having to.

Since 2010, police numbers in Hackney have fallen from 785 to under 600. The government doesn’t need to justify cuts to policing if blame for the fallout is shifted to under-resourced councils. Oh, the beauty of devolution.

In 30 years, Hackney has experienced an 800% rise in house prices. It’s easy to believe the rich own the streets, and that homeless people behaving antisocially are merely “trouble” without real value. That’s an awful way to look at citizens who tell us about the depths of our society’s problems with inequality. Their displacement doesn’t mean they no longer exist, but that they’re kept out of our sight.

Discomfort is a far easier problem to tackle rather than the desperation of people who, spectre-like, appear as the technical glitches of a deeply unequal society.