The problem with homeless hostels. And why they need fixing
Paul Jones, 45 years old and homeless, prefers to keep away from hostels. Like many men and women selling The Big Issue, he has become thoroughly fed-up of sleeping in places provided by charities for rough sleepers.
Paul stayed in the night shelter run by the Julian Trust in Bristol for about eight months after losing his job and flat in the city. “There’s 18 people packed in one big room,” he explains. “It’s chaotic, and there’s a lot of drugs and alcohol going on, which I really want to keep away from. I never really felt comfortable there at all.”
Paul (below) now makes sure he sells enough copies of The Big Issue to pay £17.50 each night for a spot at Bristol’s main backpackers’ hostel – a privately-run place used by young travellers and itinerant workers. “It’s cleaner and warmer and everybody just wants a good night’s sleep,” says Paul. “It’s been a much better place to start getting my life back together.”
Supported accommodation is supposed to offer exactly what Paul has found elsewhere: a place for homeless people to begin putting their lives together. Yet many of our vendors have reported finding it difficult to make changes and move on from the open-floor night shelters and single bedroom hostels run by charities and housing associations across the UK.
“In a lot of the large hostels they are really just warehousing homeless people,” says Matt Thomas, a 47-year-old Big Issue vendor in Oxford. “People seem to get stuck in the system indefinitely.”
“In a lot of the large hostels they are really just warehousing homeless people,” says Matt Thomas, a 47-year-old Big Issue vendor in Oxford. “People seem to get stuck in the system indefinitely.”
The supported accommodation system is also expensive. It is a system that has come to rely heavily on housing benefit, claimed on behalf of homeless residents. The government, keen to work out the true costs of supported accommodation and how best to fund it, recently commissioned an Ipsos Mori-led review of the sector. The report, set for release in November, is expected to show that supported accommodation costs the taxpayer close to £2bn a year.
“The first things the guy in the hostel said to me was, are you on benefits? You need to get housing benefit or we can’t have you here’. Outside services would come in but there wasn’t much offered by the hostel itself by way of services. Even if you asked the staff for help with something, they would tell you to go online.
“My housing benefit claim there was £866 a month,” Jason adds. “And yet I could have got decent private lets in Hull for somewhere between £350 and £425 a month for one or two-bedroom houses. It seemed crazy to me. The only thing stopping me leaving was finding the money for a deposit.”
Jason left the hostel in May after finding a one-bedroom house with a housing association, where he pays just under £350 a month in rent and around £75 a month in council tax and fuel bills. “I’m in a much better situation,” he says. “I just don’t see how hostels can possibly be worth what they’re charging – it’s a monthly wage for a lot of people across the country. Very few people would choose to be in a hostel rather than have their own place. So how can it cost more?”
Britain is in the midst of a homeless hostel crisis costing the country millions – and fuelling the nation's housing crisis
