Re your article on homeless refugees in Liverpool (‘We’re going to see people dying on the streets’: homeless refugee crisis grips Liverpool, 21 November), this crisis has arrived in Norwich. I’ve worked in homelessness for 26 years and I’ve never known it like this. The past few weeks where I work – at a long-established charity for young people – have been some of the most harrowing of my working life. In the recent cold snap, it was through pure perseverance, persuasion, graft and last-minute luck that no refugees froze to death. One young man described his fear at 4am, under the bridge where he was sleeping, when it started snowing; how he had chest pains and felt his body lock up. I am so angry and heartbroken at the callousness being shown not just by the government, which has created this hostile environment so ruthlessly, but the local authorities who are bowing to it.
It is so hard to look these young men in the eye and tell them that there is nothing more we can do apart from, maybe, open a tin of soup for them to heat up in the microwave, or on one occasion last week, buy a pair of boots for someone because his feet were so cold in his trainers and he was going to be sleeping out.
The worst is when these men are so grateful, when they make a joke about things. But no – the worst is when they stop making jokes, stop feeling able to be grateful for the miserly scraps of support we can give them, because they are starting to give up. Norwich is a “city of sanctuary”. Where is the sanctuary? How can we collectively show our compassion in the face of leaders who are determined to grind people down and make their lives un-liveable?
We are seeing a new tone of indifference towards young homeless people that scares me. Last month, a client with anxiety and depression, facing street homelessness that night, was told by the authorities to walk around a 24-hour shop all night to keep warm as they wouldn’t put him in emergency accommodation. What are we being asked to become? My colleagues and I are desperately worried about the winter to come.
Joanna Guthrie
Norwich
