Explainer

Comment

Community

Mental Health

10 October 2023

6 min read

The rough sleeper: an icon of injustice

Each rough sleeper is a raw illustration of injustice. On an awareness day for both homelessness and mental health, Jon Kuhrt reflects on the root causes and yet sees hope.

Jon Kuhrt

Jon Kuhrt is CEO of Hope into Action, a homelessness charity. He is a former government adviser on how faith groups address rough sleeping.

A black and white close up of the weather-beaten and wrinkled face and beard of a homeless man.

Portrait of a homeless man in Prague.

Ales Dusa on Unsplash.

In 2016, five-year Brooke Blair became an internet sensation after a video of her berating Prime Minister Theresa May went viral. As she put it, she was ‘very angry’:

“Yesterday night, I was out on the streets, and saw a hundred and a million of homeless people. I saw one with floppy ears, I saw loads. You should be out there, Theresa May. You should be, biscuits! Hot chocolate, sandwiches, you should be building houses. Look, I'm only five-years-old. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm saving up money but there'll never be enough. You've got the pot of money, spend some and help people.”

The video struck a chord because a young girl was passionately expressing the distress, anger, sympathy and bewilderment that so many feel when seeing people sleep rough in such a wealthy country.

The image of a rough sleeper is an icon of poverty. And just as religious icons represent the sacred, so does each person sleeping rough.

Each rough sleeper is a raw illustration of injustice and social breakdown.  The structural issues of poverty and inequality crystalize in the plight of a vulnerable person huddling in a doorway. In them we see an amalgam of both political failure and personal tragedy.

It's personal because we know that each person has a different story about what led them onto the streets. We will always be moved far more by a person than any statistic.

The image of a rough sleeper is an icon of poverty. And just as religious icons represent the sacred, so does each person sleeping rough. A precious human of infinite worth, imprinted with the divine, living in destitution. And just as restoring fragile religious icons is a specialist job, so the task of restoring those who have been homeless is often complex and intricate work.

Today, 10 October, is both World Homeless Day and World Mental Health Day. The two are closely intertwined. It’s a good day to reflect on the nature of homelessness and what we can do in the work of restoration.

We cannot simply remove the tip of the iceberg without addressing the deeper issues ... The water is getting colder and the iceberg is growing.

Rough sleeping is just the tip of a far bigger homelessness iceberg. It receives the most attention because it’s visible and visceral. But it is just a small fraction of the total number of people who have no settled home who exist underneath the waterline: those sleeping in temporary shelters, hostels and squats, sofa-surfing or placed in B&Bs.

It’s the visibility of rough sleeping that gives it political capital. Whilst in power, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Theresa May and Boris Johnson all launched high profile initiatives with ambitious targets to reduce or end rough sleeping.

In 2018, I was seconded from the Christian charity I was working for into the Civil Service as a specialist adviser on rough sleeping. In the four years I spent in this role I worked under four different Prime Ministers and six different homelessness ministers. Despite some significant progress made before and during the pandemic, the numbers of people sleeping rough and those in temporary accommodation are starting to rise again.

We cannot simply remove the tip of the iceberg without addressing the deeper issues of poverty that it is connected to. The reality is that we have a deep housing crisis in this country. The water is getting colder and the iceberg is growing.

But the challenge is that rough sleeping and homelessness are genuinely complex problems. Politics and economics provide some of the answers but not all. After thirty years of working with people who are homeless, these are the key issues which lie behind homelessness.

Poverty of resources

The most obvious cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. Housing is a resource which is not distributed fairly, and this inequity creates intense pressure and vulnerability. All of this is compounded by austerity, funding cuts and benefit sanctions which have withdrawn support services for vulnerable groups.

As London has become an international playground for the uber rich, many new housing developments are simply investment opportunities. Often people sleep rough outside accommodation no one lives in. It is a stark picture of the failure of the housing market.

This aspect of homelessness is the one that government can do most about. Brooke Blair was fundamentally right – Prime Ministers need to build more houses for those who need them.

A poverty of relationships

But homelessness is more than house-lessness. Homes are more than bricks and mortar: they are places of relationships.

And if you talk with anyone sleeping rough, you are likely to hear of relationships that have gone wrong with partners or with their wider family. Some are fleeing abuse or domestic violence; some have been perpetrators. Relational problems are often a key source of regret and shame; where people carry their deepest scars.

In our concern for people’s rights to the resources they deserve, we should not lose sight of where humans find true meaning and fulfilment. We all have a deep need to know and be known, to love and to be loved.  We cannot get away from the importance of relationships and a sense of belonging.

A poverty of identity

Finally, and most deeply, is the issue of people’s inner identity. The essential relationship that everyone has with themselves.  

The rise in mental health problems are symptoms of a vulnerability of our inner well-being.  For people affected by homelessness, their experiences of exclusion and trauma are both a root cause and an on-going reason for their mental fragility.

And the addictions to alcohol or drugs which are common to many rough sleepers are deeply connected to these psychological vulnerabilities. Drugs become a form of self-medication to ameliorate pain. And however negative, the lifestyle required to maintain addictions can be relatively exciting and can provide each give a day a clear goal. It can be hard to leave such an identity and embark on a demanding journey of recovery.

Homelessness doesn’t just end in a flat. It truly ends in community and connection.

So, in short, homelessness is far more than house-lessness. Houses are a key resource but homes are primarily places of relationships and identity. And the restoration of these cannot be just done by the government. It requires a whole community.

Thirteen years ago, a Christian couple in Peterborough, Ed and Rachel Walker chose to invest their own inheritance into a house for people who were homeless. The idea inspired others: it was simple and innovative: encourage people with wealth to invest in homes for those who are poor. And each home was attached to a local church which provides friendship and support and a critical sense of community.

This is the roots of Hope into Action where I now work. We are now a national charity with 106 homes across the country and last year we housed over 400 people. Our model is a holistic response to the types of poverty I have described.

Our tenants are provided with the resource of a great house where they feel safe and secure. And this is combined with relationships with housemates and the support of local church volunteers. And our whole focus is to empower our tenants to find a more positive identity: whether through purposeful work, on-going recovery or through exploring faith. Last year, fifty percent of our tenants chose to engage in church activities and six took the step to be baptised.

Homelessness doesn’t just end in a flat. It truly ends in community and connection. In our work we see justice and generosity in how resources are shared, compassion in the relationships that are formed, and hope on which people can rebuild a positive identity. Just as a lone rough sleeper is an icon of poverty, each of our tenants is a symbol of hope.

Article

Biology

Comment

Wildness

10 July 2025

5 min read

There’s a sting in the tail if we construct lessons from nature

Don’t be like the bees

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A bee keeper hold honeycomb to the light

HiveBoxx on Unsplash.

‘Be like the bees’ we hear not infrequently. These furry hive dwellers have been coopted by many, from socialists to capitalists, to put a point across. One party draws on their social structure as an inspiration, another their worker bee ethic. They are indeed an example to us. And yet at the same time, bee communities do things that we would find reprehensible in fellow humans. Male bees are expelled from the hive when they are no longer considered reproductively useful. The bees we see out and about this summer are often the oldest, sent to do the dangerous foraging work because they are considered the most expendable. This was a jarring discovery for me, reading it in Katherine May’s timely book, Wintering, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. I was one of the millions shielding and being protected by the ways that society shifted to serve the most vulnerable to the virus; bees, I had just learned, would not behave like this. There are some limits, it seems, to the lessons we construct from nature.

For we do love to construct them. Spend a moment on LinkedIn or Substack, and there are a multitude of articles drawing lessons from the world around us and the creatures we share it with.

This impulse is not new; throughout history, people and communities have done this. People’s relationship with nature is not static or homogenous. The wilderness has been variously a place of fear to be avoided, of growing wonder as described by the Romantic Poets, a site of knowledge neglected by those in power but maintained by others, often women and indigenous communities.

What strikes me about the current trend is that it seems to push to an extreme of unquestioning veneration: nature is perfect and our whole teacher. There are posts about perfect harmony we should emulate, or a call to copy an endless adaptability. These are the things that we might long for – but do not seem to be borne out in ecosystems where sea urchins demolish kelp forests, and the climate crisis reveals the limits of species to adjust. We are being called to see what we want (or feel we need) rather than what actually exists in the world around us.

This instinct to carve lessons from creation extends beyond the natural world to the work of human hands. The Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, has become increasingly prevalent as a metaphor for healing; a beautiful idea but one that risks being stripped of its culture, and that has both limitations and dangers. In Sarah Perry’s novel, The Essex Serpent, Cora’s husband Michael masks his abuse by speaking in a romantic metaphor of his intention to break her down and mend her with gold, like the Japanese art in their hallway. But Cora is not a vase; she is woman. Michael’s breaking harms her. She only begins to repair after he is gone; it is messy, some parts seem irrevocably changed. I think of my own losses, and how healing is indeed available, but rarely as straightforward as putting the same pieces back together. To think it is so can hinder our restoration, and miss out on the transformation that may be possible. As the journalist Poorna Bell wrote after her husband’s death by suicide: “I was in some ways sadder, wiser, but also my existence was much bigger, more honest.”

We have a great capacity to learn – and we need it to survive. As writer Andy Crouch put it in his book, Culture Making: “a human baby is the strangest and most wonderful creature this world can offer. No other mammal emerges so helpless from the womb, utterly unable to cope with the opportunity and adversity of nature. Yet no other creature holds such limitless possibility… We are hard-wired for nothing but learning. All we begin with are possibilities.”

This ability to grow and understand and change is essential if we are to navigate the world. And in our encounters with this place, with brokenness and confusion, the instinct to make meaning, to tidy, to be able to point to something and say 'this is how we should be’ is a form of comfort. Maybe even control it. We are grappling with not just how to understand the world, but how to be in it.

If we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us.

Creation and creativity have much to teach us – they’re a testament to and the fruit of the imagination of God. But to prize them just for their lessons seems to fall into another form of extraction and to miss out on something else, something that may be a greater gift in this messy world: wonder.

Bees moving from flower to flower are not setting out on their mission with a side hustle of education for the human race. They are being their full bee selves. Nectar is necessary; this is how it is collected. Bees share knowledge about the good plants via a ‘waggle dance’. This is how the colony persists. It is not for my benefit (though it may encourage me to a moment of playfulness).

Writing this on my balcony, I pause when I see dozens of birds circling one thermal; a moving column of gulls and red kites that goes up and up and up. I could strive for a teachable moment (maybe something about co-existence?) but it feels not just unnecessary, but an interruption. In that moment, I was a human being in awe of birds riding the warm air; that feels like something full of beauty in itself. I worry that if we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us. And we miss out on the opportunities to marvel at creation itself.

And, in calling each other to be like other creatures, we accidentally dehumanise other people and ourselves. In the face of conflict, polarisation and disconnection, to contend for each other’s humanity feels vital. And to recognise our own humanness is to acknowledge our limitations. There are parts of nature currently beyond our comprehension. Birdsong holds complexity heard by the intended audience but we can only guess at its meaning. There is something to accepting the edges of our own understanding. Sometimes we touch on truths that seem to contradict or be in tension. Perhaps they are layers that we cannot intellectually fit together but that build up a fuller, richer story that resonates in our souls. Glimpsing something of the multifaceted wisdom and wonder of God himself – and that helps us to remember who we are. A particular type of creature: a human.

So, I won’t be a bee. I’ll keep trying to learn to be what I am: a particular human in a bigger community, world and story. Now, I’m off to admire the goldfinches, glinting in the sunshine.

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