‘I thought I’d be dead by now’ – can Labour use Blair template to cut ‘shameful’ levels of rough sleeping?

Ian Harrison watches a film in which, 16 years ago, he is on the streets begging for money in Covent Garden.

Recorded in 2008, we see a fresh-faced 19-year-old Ian, who has been evicted from his flat, telling the camera he is going to take as many drugs as he can get.

“I want to get so far gone, all my problems go away, just for tonight,” he says.

Watching this, 35-year-old Ian blinks slowly.

He nods and lets out a big sigh. Then his teenage self says something prescient: “Nothing changes, only time, and the people I’m begging from.”

Ian nods again: “He is right. Look where I am now!”

Ian is still homeless, his face now wears the years he’s lived on the streets and the addiction to heroin and crack he is still battling.

And although he has a room in a hostel for the moment, his life is on the same cliff-edge it was all those years ago.

It is significant that Ian became homeless in the late 2000s, towards the end of the Blair/Brown era, when a drive to tackle rough sleeping had successfully reduced numbers on the streets by two-thirds and kept them low for a sustained period.

The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn saw homelessness numbers begin to rise, and steadily do so for a decade until a period during the pandemic triggered a drive to get people off the streets.

But now it is peaking again and last year Ian was among 11,993 rough sleepers in London – the highest ever recorded in the capital.

Labour‘s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, described the situation as “shameful” as she took over the task of sorting it out.

Ms Rayner will lead a new cross-government taskforce to tackle the issue, which has echoes of Tony Blair‘s cross-department approach.

However, the success of Blair’s rough sleeping unit, launched in 1999, was also attributed to its focus on attempting to tackle the causes of homelessness, not just finding people places to stay.

This is something Ian feels is lacking now.

Despite having a roof over his head, his single room looks like the streets have followed him in.

The floor is covered in rubbish, the sink and walls stained, flies buzz around a small boxy space that smells not dissimilar to the cardboard home he lived in under the Hammersmith flyover a few months ago.

Ian grew up in care and says he hasn’t learned how to look after himself.

He says: “I struggle with a lot of basic things in life. I never had parents to say brush your teeth, get in the shower do this, do that, when you grow up into an adult you don’t have that stuff.”

‘Hard to be stable in a place like this’

He is off the drugs and has a prescription for methadone, but says his environment doesn’t help.

“It’s hard to be stable in a place like this, because it’s a very unstable place to be in,” he says.

“If you are picking someone up and putting them in a hostel with 26 other people who are all addicts, it’s not going to take long before it’s going to rub off on you.”

He is in supported accommodation but says it doesn’t offer the support he needs, which is self-care, organisation and, frankly, a great deal of therapy.

No one has ever addressed the root causes of Ian’s problems.

“From a very young age, you know, I went through a lot of sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, which was sustained daily, for years,” he says.

“They say you need therapy, but to get the therapy you need to be completely clean of drugs and alcohol for a couple of years. But that’s part of the illness, it’s part of the symptoms of the illness.”

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‘Stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years’

It will be the task of Ms Rayner’s cross-department team to try to turn around the lives of people like Ian – and it won’t be cheap.

But the Sky News producer who filmed the footage back in 2008 and has known Ian since that time, has seen him go through countless hostels (around 30, says Ian) and mental institutions, only to eventually end up back out on the streets.

The long-term cost of not solving Ian’s problems is incalculable.

“I’ve been stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years,” he says.

“l become homeless, get into a hostel, become homeless. You give up.”

Asked what his 19-year-old self would have hoped to being doing in his 30s, Ian says: “To be honest, I thought I’d be dead by now. And I wouldn’t have cared if I was.”

But Ian does care now.

A wish list, written on his hostel wall, reads: “Stop using all drugs, save up more cash, care 4 self better, start up business, go to gym, get routine, have camping holiday.”

To achieve this, he is going to need the kind of help that has eluded him all his life.