Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

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Profiting from the homeless?

May 22 2009
Homeless organisations (and The Pavement!) need homelessness to fund their generous lifestyles, says a reader (This letter has been edited for length)

Dear Editor,

You can read everywhere the views of all these people from different organisations who claim to care about the homeless and who, in fact, have an extremely pleasant lifestyle from caring for the homeless, to the extent that you feel they would panic if there was a decline in the number of homeless. For example, Shaks Gosh, chief executive of Crisis, who wants to extend services to the homeless, and John Bird of the Big Issue, who feels we are being "mollycoddled"?

How much have you personally made from exploiting the homeless since you started?

It's the same with big organisations like Crisis. Like many homeless people I consider it to be a money-making racket for those who claim to care about us, and the "services" I have used are chaotic and under-resourced - please don't tell me that Crisis is short of money. Crisis at Christmas was the ultimate triumph of Public Relations over substance - the services offered by the Quakers, who get no funding, were far superior to those offered by Crisis at its Public Relations extravaganza. (But both these organisations have plenty of [people] who will write in to contradict me.)

I would like to see all these organisations (including Thames Reach Bondway) closed down, and the money used to re-house people - there is a vast amount of empty housing in the North which I have discovered there is a wall of silence about when I have tried to get information. Why? Because it would put the homeless organisations out of business? How much does Shaks Gosh make personally, out of interest?

If The Pavement is genuinely a paper for the homeless, and not just a mouthpiece for the homeless industry, could you do an investigation into the vast fees charged by organisations like St Mungo's, Sally Army etcetera for hostel places (giving figures) which (because housing benefit is such a nightmare) mean that people cannot obtain work in hostels despite having to tell Jobcentres that they are doing so.

This is a major reason why people like myself will not use hostels.

George Orwell
Real name supplied

Dear George,

Thank you for writing in, and you've covered so many issues for debate that we may look at in future.

For a start, we make nothing from The Pavement.

As to your complaints levelled at some of the larger organisations, no doubt they are expensive to fund, but - and it's a big but - you have a choice whether to use their services, and, as a few of our lead articles show, some of that money achieves interesting and practical results (VoiceMail4All?).

We do believe that it is important that there is a broad selection of day centres and services available (both in ethos and funding), so that you can vote with you feet.

Editor
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