In particular, the council wants to stop soup runs and rough sleeping in the area around Westminster Cathedral and has commenced a four-week consultation intended to close on March 25. It hopes to introduce a new by-law banning them by October. The issue – which has divided charities – may turn out to be a genuine acid test of the bona fides of the “Big Society”. The justification offered by Westminster council is that charitable provision only encourages dependency and traps recipients in a downward spiral of poverty and life on the streets. It says it has plenty of professional programmes for tackling homelessness. One of these, Supporting People, has had its budget cut from £17 million to £14.4 million in the coming year. Critics say Westminster’s real policy is to drive homeless people out of the borough entirely, a charge which is met with a shrug and a smile by some of its more hard-line councillors. The most even-handed research on the issue was published in 2009 by Laura Lane and Anne Power of the London School of Economics, Soup Runs in Central London: The right help in the right place at the right time? It addresses just why Westminster is uniquely such a focus for the homeless and applauds the Simon Community’s Street Cafe initiative. Housing Justice also casts a much-needed perspective on the debate. Estimates of the numbers of people directly affected vary. Westminster says between 100 and 150 people sleep rough near the Cathedral, while other estimates say 1,600 people – ex-servicemen and women and Eastern European migrants prominent among them – are directly affected. The prospect of homeless people being swept off the capital’s streets while the rest of the world visits to attend the Olympics is not without precedent, but surely it’s not the kind of thing we would wish to see in London?
