When people are rough sleeping, in particular, there's not always many
resources available to them. And so theft is not uncommon, which obviously is a
criminal activity. But we also kind of have things like the fact that many
people, even if they didn't have a substance misuse issue when they went
onto the streets will frequently end up with one, whether that's because
everyone around them is doing it. And it's like, you know what?
It's rough on the streets. I might as well. Or whether that's because-- and this does
happen-- drug dealers will target homeless people because they know
they're quite vulnerable. They know they're in a bad way. They know that if
they get them hooked on to stuff, they will actually be a very good regular customer.
So in the UK, it's not illegal to be homeless in the UK. But currently, there are civil
laws and criminal laws which make the behaviours
and activities of homeless people in the UK illegal.
In Hemel Hempstead, let's just say, I had this one particular police officer who
knew me. And he was such a nice bloke. But yet, he had a job to do. And I
understand that and I appreciate that. But then there's some other police officers
that just really wasn't nice. Even if they know you, they don't know you. They're so
hard on you. I've got back problems, so I never used to give the police any
trouble anyway. But they're always on your case. Even if you're just walking through
and you've done absolutely
nothing wrong. And you just come out of the court, so you've done no stealing,
no nothing, no drugs,
nothing like that all. They still pull you over.
And by criminalising the activities of homeless people in the UK makes it very
difficult for homeless people to exist without committing a crime.
If you get caught begging,
you get caution, penalised for it, whatever you want to call it. But you only get so
many chances, like, two, I think. So I've known a few
people to be kicked out of a centre and go to prison just for that alone.
The amount of people that shoplift is unbelievable. It's a lot more than what
you think. So most of them end up going to prison.
So for example, it's illegal to be drunken in public, in certain parts of city areas.
It's illegal to be found begging, to be received, asking for money.
Because of beggars, people wouldn't be able to show humanity.
So in a way, they provide a service, you know. It's not that I've got anything
against begging. It's just that I can't do it myself. I just can't do it.
You're not going to have a sufficient income often, which is
the case. You're not going to have sufficient material resources.
You're not going to have
all the very many things that we need just to kind of get through from a day to day.
I mean, I've been hungry. And I've walked in the stores-- and I'm talking about
well before all the security that they have these days. And I just couldn't do it.
I just couldn't. I had a tin of ham in front of me, a big tin of ham,
one of the big oval ones, big tin of ham in front of me. And I just couldn't do it.
I think because a few chains that I did steal when I was a kid,
petty stuff, I just felt so bad about it.
Nine times out of ten, I always got caught anyway.
So that in itself, as a context, is likely to generate certain forms of criminal
activity, which are going to be just about how do you get through to get enough to
eat. How do you get enough to stay warm? How do you get enough to actually have
sufficient life resources just to actually survive?
If we think about the criminalization of homelessness,
what we see is that-- as well as historical legislation, like the Vagrancy Act, that's
used, we also see the introduction of things like public spaces protection
orders, or PSPOs as they're often called. Although government guidance
from 2017 says that PSPOs shouldn't criminalise rough sleeping and
homelessness, the Freedom of Information request that the
Manifesto Club put in in 2019 found that three local authorities are still
issuing PSPOs in relation to activities relating to rough sleeping. And about
20 or so are still using these to criminalise things like begging
or loitering in public spaces.
And we are seeing, increasingly, local authorities relying on the police.
And we're seeing increasing police monitoring of homeless people living
on the streets in order to clamp down on vagrancy-related offences. And so we've
seen about 70% increase in vagrancy-related offences
since 2006 to current times. We've seen a 70%
increase there. So as we're seeing a rise in numbers of homelessness,
we're also seen a rise in the numbers of civil orders and
criminal laws that are used against the homeless as well.
A second dimension, which is very, very important, particularly in the context of
rough sleepers is of course the visibility and the very public nature of the actual
homelessness itself, and therefore, often the very public nature of the criminal
activity, which is much more likely to be policed, and much more likely to be
identified, and therefore, dealt with by the criminal process more broadly. So
you have in the first instance, where many people will often break the law, they may
break the law in a private space. They may break the law in their homes. They may
break the law in spaces which are not being observed so readily and under
such surveillance by wider society. But somebody on the street, somebody
who is very, very visible to public surveillance and very, very visible to the
policing and then the criminal process, the kind of behaviours that they're willing to
undertake is likely, or much more likely, to fall under the remit of the criminal law.