Charity Insights

My last week at The Passage was full of meetings with representatives of the various organisations that I had contacted over the preceding weeks. If nothing else this gave me an excellent opportunity to visit some parts of London that I hadn’t previously been aware of. Fortunately the majority of my meetings were extremely useful and provided a new perspective or some new information.

One issue that I discovered through these interviews was the problem of supported accommodation beds being occupied by EEA nationals who are in fact ready to move on. These residents are covered by the saving section of the new legislation which exempts those who were in receipt of housing benefit before the legislation came in to force. However this saving clause ceases to apply when a client makes a new claim. Moving to a different local authority necessarily involves making a new claim but it is possible to move within a single local authority. For residents in central boroughs such as Westminster private rents are unaffordable so they cannot move on within their local authority and if they moved they would no longer be eligible for housing benefit. Previously people recovering from homelessness would be expected to move from supported accommodation in central London to private accommodation in less central areas due to the lack of affordable accommodation in the centre; this pathway has now been disrupted.

I often found that the people I was interviewing would repeat opinions and stories that I had heard from other workers in the sector. This was encouraging as it indicated that these opinions were not baseless and the issues they reflected were not isolated.  For example the predicament explained above was alluded to both by a commissioner at Westminster City council, the submission of evidence to SSAC by St Mungo’s,  the manager of a housing program and a representatives of several day centres.

As well as providing information for my report the interviews enabled me to develop a number of useful skills, not least of which was budgeting my time carefully where the London Underground was involved. I learnt the necessity of having questions prepared; a practise that became easier as time wore on since I found that the certain questions were getting useful responses while others were simply too general and could lead to a long talk that was not eventually relevant to my report. Keeping a meeting on focus was therefore another ability that naturally became useful. Finally and perhaps trivially I got a great deal of practise at taking just the right amount of notes; that is, enough that I retain the relevant information but not so much that the interviewee thinks I am recording him verbatim, in which case he may become reticent.

Read Final Week at The Passage in full

For the first week that I worked at The Passage I mainly did research from my desk. This meant working out exactly how the changes to benefits eligibility worked; a non trivial task. Reading the actual legislation was only marginally helpful so I had to look elsewhere for information. This lead me to find that the Social Services Advisory Committee (SSAC) was investigating the effects of the change. Thankfully the minutes of all the SSAC meetings are published online and I was able to find out more about the intended effects of the change. As part of their investigation, SSAC called for ‘evidence’ from organisations working with homeless people, such as St Mungo’s. These organisations submitted documents explaining how the change had affected their work and I was able to read these documents and find out a lot about some of the unforeseen effects of the change.

After researching for a week I felt ready to begin contacting other organisations and so I drew up a list of day centres and other institutions that work with homeless people and might be able to give some helpful information.

Alongside the work I was doing for the report on non UK EEA nationals I also  did various odd jobs around the office. Being able to do different tasks for different people lets you get a wider breadth of experience and try new things and I feel that it is a strong reason to work in a medium sized organisation such as The Passage. It is large enough that there is always something to do but not so large that people’s roles have become overly specialised. Because of this I could find myself writing the organisation’s twitter and facebook posts one morning, wrestling an enormous desk through a maze of corridors and staircases the next day and questing all the way to Wandsworth in search of discounted furniture only to end up negotiating with the manager of the local homebase that afternoon. Being trusted with access to the Twitter, Facebook and website of The Passage felt like a large responsibility; it was being allowed to represent the organisation to the public in effect. I was also often asked to research a particular opportunity. This might mean looking for a company to make branded keyrings or it might mean searching for funding organisations that could pay for a research project. Overall I was able to get a real sense for how things actually get done in a medium sized business.

Read Variety of work at The Passage in full

Today I thought I would provide a brief summary of developments over the last few years.

The first wave of A8 nationals (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia) arrived in 2004. Within 8 hours of the borders opening there was a queue from the passage all the way to Victoria Coach station. At the peak of the influx 53 coaches from Warsaw arrived in a single day. As many migrants were from Catholic countries they immediately went to nearby Westminster Cathedral which directed them to The Passage. At that time a potential client did not have to have ‘support needs’ to be eligible for The Passage’s services. Having support needs means having some kind of mental or physical health issue; this is because The Passage aims to work with only the most vulnerable adults.  Initially this influx was considered a boon for the careers and training department as they now had a large number of clients with a good chance of finding a job. However it soon became clear that many clients, including some with qualifications as high as Masters degrees, wanted work as soon as possible even if it was unskilled and poorly paid and despite their over qualification for the sort of work they were seeking. This was so that they could start sending money home as quickly as possible. This was compounded by lack of understanding of how job-seeking in the UK economy differs to job-seeking in Poland. Unrealistic expectations on this matter combined with the language barrier and cultural differences resulting in difficult communications. For example if asked to present themselves at the day center between ten and three, many clients would arrive at 2:55 and fail understand why they were not able to be seen. Not enough minimum wage work was available and in 2005 the decision was taken to exclude EEA jobseekers from The Passage’s target client group and introduce the support needs criteria. The ‘building base services’ initiative aimed to discourage organisations such as The Passage from supporting people in continuing to sleep rough. To this end use of the day center was made conditional on assessment and full engagement with The Passage’s other services where appropriate; beforehand this was only strongly encouraged. After these changes some clients turned to the black market to look for work.

Read Previous developments in EEA migration in full

On my first morning at The Passage I was granted the blessing of a leisurely start: at eleven I presented myself at reception and met Miranda, who was to be my supervisor, for the first time. No work got done that morning, instead we talked about the project that I was to work on and agreed some first steps.

My work consisted of researching, and then writing a report on, the situation of European economic migrants with ‘no recourse to public funds’. These are both terms that would benefit from clarification. For the purposes of my report, I effectively considered any national of a country in the European Economic Area (EEA) other than the UK to be an economic migrant. This was generally an accurate assumption within the group of people that I was considering: the homeless. No recourse to public funds is a pleasant little turn of phrase that I first encountered in a document published by Westminster City Council: it means that a person is not eligible for any benefits.

So why was I looking at this particular group of people? Because they are an increasingly problematic client group (The Passage refers to the homeless people who use their services as clients) for organisations like The Passage. This is because of two separate changes in the rules regarding eligibility for certain benefits: on January 1st eligibility for jobseeker’s allowance was removed for non UK EEA nationals and on April 1st housing benefit was removed as well. This is a simplification as there are saving clauses and exceptional circumstances.

My task was to contact organisations that worked with this client group all over London and find out how they were responding to the changes and to develop a clear picture of the work that The Passage was able to do.  The ideal outcome of this exercise would be to discover some way of effectively helping these clients or some service to which they could be referred. If that was not achievable then the report would serve to clarify the situation and draw together information on it in to one place.

Read Beginning at The Passage in full