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 In the end the proposals were quietly withdrawn.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

Comment

Migration

Politics

Romance

3 July 2025

5 min read

Families like mine are impossible now, thanks to the idol that is the net migration target

Politician priests are making pointless sacrifices on the altar of numbers

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A Border Force officer wears body armour with Immigration Enforcement written on the back

UK Border Force.

Let me tell you a love story. Eighteen years ago, in a time before politicians had taken to immolating their values on the altar of the semiannual net migration totals, I fell for the pretty Scottish bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. The romance presented some challenges for an American like me, but none that were insurmountable. She found a year-long internship near me in Seattle and, just before she returned home, I popped the question.

The process of applying for a UK visa was just another bit of the tedious logistics of an overseas move, the kind of thing a romantic comedy skips over with a ‘One Year Later’ movie subtitle so that it can end with a joyous wedding ceilidh in a picturesque Scottish locale. Our first few years together in Edinburgh were lean ones. Having takeaway coffee more than once a week felt like a scandalously indulgent luxury. Even so, I was able to progress seamlessly from my marriage visa to indefinite leave to remain, to citizenship.

None of this would be possible if we were young twentysomethings in love today. We would fail every test of what the Home Office now considers to be acceptable romance.

During our first year of marriage, the stipend my wife received while training for ministry would have been well short of the £18,600 income threshold introduced in 2012 for a sponsoring spouse, let alone the £29,000 required now. While we did have some savings, they were nowhere near the £88,500 now needed to waive the income requirement, and, in any case, would have been substantially drained by the £5,000 in fees and health surcharges that a two-and-half-year spouse visa now costs. It is little wonder Brits who have found love abroad, even ones in a substantially better financial and professional position than we were then, are now finding it impossible to move back to the UK.

What is the cause of these new barriers? A hint can be found in the title of a recent Guardian article about recommendations for a slight relaxation of the income threshold to between £23,000 to £25,000. ‘Lowering UK’s income requirement for family visas ‘would increase net migration’, the piece was headlined. When even the most left wing major daily in Britain can’t report on the possibility of things being marginally easier for Brits who have the temerity to love a non-citizen, without framing it in terms of net migration, it’s a sign that we have all fallen captive to this singular statistic.

Net migration is a number created by humans and yet it has come to play the role of an angry god which demands sacrifices every time it is reported. The right of working class people to marry a non-citizen spouse, the economic viability of our universities, and the proper staffing of the NHS are all victims its politician-priests have offered up in hopes that they would satiate its hunger. Net zero maybe next.

There is no particular reason to think totting up the total number of people who arrived in the UK with the intention of staying here for a year and then subtracting the total number who left with the intention of staying abroad for a similar duration is a particularly meaningful exercise. It conflates people like me, who came here with every intention to settle and start a family, with students coming for a one-year master’s, doctors filling vital roles in NHS with children try to stay with with a migrant parent and Afghan refugees seeking long-term sanctuary with oil workers serving time in Aberdeen before moving on to Calgary or Brunei.

The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to think carefully about how much of each form of migration to allow, but when they are all grouped together under this single measure a peculiar logic sets in. Want to do the right thing by welcoming refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong? Well, then, we’ll have to offset that with restricting visas for overseas students and throwing our higher education sector into chaos. Need more highly skilled programmers working in banks in London? Well, maybe we can balance that by demanding care workers abandon their kids if they want to look after someone in Nottingham. There is no reason to weigh the needs of these different sectors against each other, and yet the logic of this statistic demands that we do.

The Bible has a word for human-made things which take on their own singular, violent logic. It calls them idols. While that word may conjure images of golden calves, the accusation which biblical writers consistently make against idolaters, that their idols blind them to what is really important and numbs their critical thinking, applies equally well when the idol is a statistic. The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments. It has made us unable to say what should be said without glancing nervously at its imposing shadow. It causes us to say things that should never be said and not notice how absurd they are.

Instead, we should be able to celebrate that hundreds of thousands of people want to come to study at our universities (the vast majority of whom return home after finishing their studies) and, hopefully, someday also be able to celebrate when hundreds of thousands of refugees are able to return to a peaceful and liberated Ukraine without having to calculate that the former will raise and the latter lower our totals. We should be able to welcome easing of income restrictions on spouse visas without noting that it will lead to a marginal increase in net migration. We should be able to see that sending an eight- and eleven-year-old back to Brazil without their parents is not, in the words of a Home Office official, “a degree of disruption in family life” which is “proportionate to the legitimate aim of maintaining effective immigration control”, but rather a gross violation of human decency.

Migrants are not just numbers on a balance sheet. The diversity of our lives, what we give to the UK, what we receive in return, cannot be summed up in a single annual figure. And yet every six months, as the figure comes out, politicians express disappointment and announce measures to put that little bit of extra pressure on us, so that maybe a few more of us who can leave will. In the process they are sacrificing to this idol not just the peace of mind and the economic well-being of many migrants, but also much of the vitality of the nation as a whole. The Bible has a solution for idols. They are only fit to be melted down, destroyed, and forgotten. It is time to consider giving this one a similar treatment.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief