Matt left home and came to London to find work, detox and start a new life. However, life in London was much more expensive than he had thought and Matt found he couldn’t even afford a bed and breakfast. He didn’t know anyone who could accommodate him or help him find work either so he was forced to spend the nights at the “Cardboard City” and the days begging or looking for something to eat that night. Until he found a job at the Big Issue which was “a ray of hope in the middle of that dark misery”. As I listened to his story I found myself wondering how many Matt’s were there in the UK? How many other people had lost their homes and found themselves begging, selling magazines or just stumbling from one street corner to the next? How many of them could be someone like me?
Government statistics talk about hundreds of thousands but in actual fact, they only include people who have applied to local authorities for help – usually families with children and especially vulnerable people. This means that people like Matt are not included in these figures and they represent 40% of homeless people. Homelessness includes all sorts of people, from those who are literally roofless to those who are forced to live in places such as bed and breakfast hotels, hostels, women’s refuges, squats, friends or relatives floors, etc and may also include women with no option but to remain in abusive or maltreating situations. How many people are then not taken into account? And, more important, how do we help all these people, because it is our duty as fellow citizens to transform these people’s miserable lives into prosperous and happy ones.
Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, the problem is far more substantial than it appears. It has grown notably in the past years and is still doing so due to various economic and social problems such as decreasing number of rented accommodations which means that people are forced either to buy their homes or to give them up. No affordable households for those with low incomes doesn’t help either as it obliges them to live on the streets. Increasing unemployment has caused 3% of those who lost their last home in 2000 to do so because of mortgage arrears. The growth in single households is another factor that has helped the problem of homelessness increase as it means that less people can be accommodated in one household. I urge you to take action and action now to solve these problems that affect so many people in our country. Donate some of your time and money. It just takes a little goodwill to make things better for these people who, for some reason or another, have found themselves living in inhuman conditions that nobody should ever have to suffer.
These problems could affect anyone of us anytime. Each and every one of us could become Matt if we don’t take action. Cities such as Leeds or London where money is in the air have their own Cardboard Cities where misery is in the air. The only thing we need to do to make them disappear is stop ignoring them, pretending they are invisible and that we can’t see them. We need to take action, build households for people on low incomes and create jobs for all those qualified people out there who are living under a cardboard box.
By: Alejandra Garrido