Article

Comment

Community

Politics

8 November 2023

5 min read

A tents dispute about how to help the homeless

To house the homeless, argues Jon Kuhrt, silly soundbites and hasty policies need to be replaced with the right relationships and radical reform.

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.

In an underpass a pedestrian passes and look at the tent of a homeless person.

Spielvogel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2011: London’s Westminster City Council proposes byelaws to ban rough sleeping and to prevent groups distributing food to people in need, known as ‘soup runs’, in the Victoria area.

The proposals caused an almighty uproar from charities and community groups and demonstrations outside the council offices. In addition, both the London Mayor Boris Johnson, and the Conservative central government spoke out against the plans. In the end the proposals were quietly withdrawn.

At the time I was Director of the West London Mission, a homelessness charity based in Westminster. We worked closely with both churches and the council but we publicly disagreed with the plans because they were divisive, polarising and unworkable.

‘Lifestyle choice’

2023: The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, makes comments on social media about cracking down on rough sleepers who sleep in tents. Among other comments, Braverman said:

"We cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.”

Again, Braverman’s comments have provoked an avalanche of criticism. In the middle of a housing and cost of living crisis, the accusation that people living in tents are simply making a ‘lifestyle choice' is rightly seen by many as simplistic, harsh and deeply unhelpful to addressing the serious issue of rough sleeping.

Nothing represents UK poverty and exclusion with such visceral power as the sight of someone huddling in a doorway. Therefore, to the average person, providing help to rough sleepers makes sense. Banning help appears harsh and inhumane. These are issues that need talking about carefully and compassionately.

After 25 years of working for homeless charities, I worked for four years in the Government’s Rough Sleeping Initiative as an Adviser on how faith and community groups addressed homelessness. Building trust and cooperation between charities, churches and government was the key focus of my work.

And probably the most sensitive of all issues is how the outdated ‘Vagrancy Act’ of 1824 could be replaced. I know what frustration the Home Secretary’s ill-judged comments will cause to those in government working hard on reducing rough sleeping.

Dangerous and insecure

But whilst it’s right to condemn Braverman’s comments, we have to consider how we respond and not simply add to the unhelpful polarisation of these issues. The answer to anti-tent rhetoric is not to encourage people to give out more tents.

It may sound obvious, but the key thing to focus on is the welfare of rough sleepers at the heart of this discussion. And that does not mean we endorse every form of help that is offered.

The truth is that the rise in the use of cheap tents to sleep rough in is a genuine problem that local councils and charities have been struggling to address. They often create dangerous and insecure environments and can easily mask people’s serious declines in physical and mental health.

Christian response

A few years ago, I worked closely with All Saints Church in the centre of Northampton because they had 15 tents pitched in their churchyard. The drug use, defecation and other behaviours of those living in the tents were genuinely anti-social and problematic. Tensions with the council were rising and the vicar, Oliver Coss, was grappling with what the right Christian response was. Of course, there was genuine housing need in the town but what was happening in his churchyard was no good for anyone.

Through careful discussions, we brokered a plan of joint action between the church, the local authority and the key local charity. Those sleeping rough in the churchyard were given notice and were told the tents would be removed on a certain date but alongside this, interviews and offers of housing were made to everyone. I have huge respect for the way Rev.Coss navigated these tricky waters with resolve and compassion. He took heat, especially when the national press picked up the story but he steered a course which was genuinely best for all concerned. Theologically, his actions were the right blend of grace and truth.

Relationship and trust

Last winter I was involved in a similar way with an encampment in the park right behind my house in south London. It was causing serious concern to many local people due to the fires being lit, rubbish piling up and the vermin it attracted. I got to know almost all of the occupants of the camp as they attended a drop in meal I run at my church. The relationship and trust we developed helped me liaise between them and the council’s rough sleeping coordinator and this led to the camp being cleared and each of them offered temporary accommodation.

Informed debate

Rather than hasty policies or silly soundbites, we need a more honest and informed public discussion about rough sleeping. Addressing homelessness is complex because it involves an interweaving of structural injustice and the personal challenges that individuals face. Simplistic comments may work well on social media, but they don’t help people in the real world.

Enforcement is not the dirty word it is often made out to be – sometimes it is a vital ingredient in helping someone change their life. But in order to work, it must always be accompanied by a valid offer of accommodation, a meaningful step off the streets. And for too many, especially non-UK nationals, no such step exists.

Radical reform

Housing should be the key issue in the next election. We need urgent and radical policy reform to build more social housing. Record numbers are housed in expensive temporary accommodation which is causing bankruptcy in some local authorities. Millions of pounds of public money has been wasted in housing people for years in hotels which could have been used so much more productively.

We need more of the longer-term, community-based solutions to homelessness such as those pioneered by Hope into Action. We attract investment to buy houses which we turn into homes for people who have been homeless. In addition to professional support, each house is connected to a local church who provide friendship and community.

People sleeping rough in tents is not a ‘lifestyle choice’. It is the visible tip of a vast homelessness iceberg in this country caused by relational poverty and chronic underinvestment in affordable housing. And if we do not address the problems beneath the waterline, then we should not be surprised to see more tents appearing in our towns and parks.

Article

Character

Comment

Mental Health

Politics

4 August 2025

4 min read

Why reducing the voting age is a mistake

Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A band and audience are back lit against a stage.

Let it out.

Kylie Paz on Unsplash

The haunting book of Ecclesiastes carries these memorable words:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to weep, and a time to laugh

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak

They came to mind recently when reading of the UK government’s plan to reduce the minimum voting age to 16. Now I understand why this government might want to do this. Lowering the voting age has proved popular in other places such as Scotland. Some well brought up 16-year-olds are mature beyond their years, show an interest in politics, and are smart, articulate people. And, of course, younger people tend to be more inclined to vote for left-leaning parties like Labour. It makes electoral sense.

But does it make generational sense?

Adolescence is a time when we try out being grown-up for a while. Mid-teenagers are no longer children, but they are not yet fully adult. They are in the process of spreading their wings, most of them still at school, living at home under their parents’ roofs, not yet fully responsible for their own time, income, life choices and so on. They can’t legally buy alcohol, fireworks or drive a car. Yet they can buy a pet or a lottery ticket. It’s a kind of middling time, not one thing nor the other.

And rightly so. Adolescence is a time for a certain controlled irresponsibility. We all look back with embarrassment on things we did in our teenage years. A few years ago, I watched a cricketer called Ollie Robinson make his debut for England at Lords. The best day of his life turned into the worst when some journalist desperate for a story dug up some semi-racist tweets he had posted several years before as a teenager. Some say he has never recovered, as he struggled with the media attention into his life, and has not played international cricket for over two years. We all said stupid things when we were 16 and that should be expected and forgiven as what they were – immature posturing, attempts to work out who we are in the big world, testing the water of the adult world before we dive in. Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft, to get some things wrong and some things right. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and our successes and grow up a bit through them.

The attempt to make 16-years olds politically responsible seems to encroach upon that safe space. It risks skewing an important stage of growing up. And this seems to be a modern trend.

Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time.

In the past, 21 was the age when people legally became adults, being given the ‘key to the door’, trusted to come in and out of the house independently of parents. Yet that has shifted within living memory. The legal age of adulthood was reduced to 18 in 1969.

Jonathan Haidt recently complained that we are seeing “the complete rewiring of childhood.” The childhood of mammals, he claimed, involves rough and tumble play, chasing games, activities that develop adult skills. In recent times, he says, we have put into the pockets of children and young teenagers, a video arcade, a porn theatre, a gambling casino, and access to every TV station. The result of indiscriminate access to smartphones has been the loss of what we recognise as childhood and its replacement by gazing at screens all day long.

This shift to the voting age is also part of the drift to politicise everything. Everything becomes political, from your artistic tastes, to gender differences, to the food you eat, to family relationships. If politics is everything then surely everyone affected by it must vote? Yet politics has its limits. Politicians can only do so much. They can try to fix the economy, close loopholes that let harmful behaviour flourish, organise life a little better for most of us. They cannot fix the human heart, get us to love our neighbours or teach us gratitude, humility, faith, or what to worship – the most important choice of our lives.

Not everything is political, but everything is spiritual. Everything moulds us in some way, shaping us into the people we become over time, like plasticene in the hands of a child. Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time, being given leeway to develop our moral senses and to work out our opinions as we encounter the wider world.

There is indeed a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to choose, and a time to play; a time to be an adult and a time to be child. Perhaps we should respect the times and seasons of life a little better, letting teenagers be teenagers and not expecting them to become adult too quickly. Most will hopefully have many years to vote if they live long healthy lives. The distinctions of time and the delicate, slow process of maturity need to be respected. We erode them at our peril.

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