Colin is sat on a doorstep behind Barton Arcade, home to some of Manchester’s most expensive shops. He’s waiting for a hot drink, which is brought to him by a friendly barista from the back of one of Deansgate’s many coffee shops.
He is happy to chat to the Manchester Evening News , but does not want to be identified. “I don’t want my family to see me like this,” Colin, not his real name, explains. “It will break their hearts.”
The 60-year-old, originally from Gorton, worked most of his life as a welder and a joiner. He’s been homeless for roughly five years throughout his life, and this stretch on the streets started six months ago when his relationship broke down.
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“It’s got busier [with more rough sleepers],” he says. “It’s been hard, sleeping in doorways. People think it’s funny and can p**s on you.
“The scrotes are setting fire to you and your tent and sleeping bag. That was about two years ago for me. I smelled it, got out, but then it went up.”
Colin’s story is one of many the M.E.N came across when searching out the stories of the people who are hidden in plain sight. Now, as the cost-of-living crisis begins to bite, charities, not-for-profits, the council — and rough sleepers themselves all say there’s been a steady rise in homelessness.
But there’s more to come. There’s going to be an avalanche of people on the streets in Manchester if predictions come true.
"Since Covid no-one is carrying any change"
One man, sat outside a souvenir shop on Exchange Square, will not chat to the M.E.N. — but in eight words, he offers a summary of what it’s like to be sleeping rough currently.
“The streets are s***. There’s not enough help,” he says. He carries on asking for change.
Further down the road is Stuart Cody. Both he and his partner are homeless. He turned to the streets six months ago after his last relationship ended.
He explained: “I’ve been homeless on and off for 12 years. Six months ago my relationship broke down.
The 37-year-old went on: “It’s hard to get somewhere [in sheltered accommodation] as a couple. It always gets worse at Christmas. We get all the junkies and alcies that come out even if they have a property. Since Covid, no one has been carrying change with them.”
The lack of change in the post-pandemic world — a world dominated by ‘tap here’ and ‘we are a cashless business’ signs — is a real problem for people living on the very edge. Even those selling the Big Issue, often seen as some way to make a living, are feeling it.
"When people cut back on spending, they cut back on us first"
Justin Green and his dog, Bumper, are a regular fixture in St Ann’s Square. The 53-year-old said: “It’s impossible to make money at the moment. Everything is on card. I have not got a bank account.
“It’s getting cold now so people feel sorry for you and they notice you more, but my B&B is full up every night with homeless people.
“When people cut back on spending, they cut back on us first. Then dog food is going up for Bumper too.”
Justin counts himself as one of the lucky ones, though. He has a new job in January valeting cars.
Andrew Shearing, a 53-year-old man originally from Oldham, passes the time away by reading and writing poetry. He first came to know Market Street as a home five years ago.
“I had cancer. They sent me somewhere which was like prison,” he says while sat against a bin, clutching a cardboard sign asking for help next to the Metrolink stop. “It was that bad, the conditions. I had every single bit of money taken off me.
“I just had to get away. It was a 15 year relationship I left. Because she was funny about the cancer, it ended. [My situation has] got worse. I still have pain through the cancer. I have osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, and with the cold it’s much worse.”
"I got kicked out of Portugal because of Brexit"
Bruce Leonard Kirk, 54, is originally from South Africa. Currently, he’s homeless in Manchester, but spent time living rough in Spain. He says his life was ‘normal’ until a few years ago, then everything changed.
“My relationship broke down after 27 years,” he summarises. “In 2015, I tried to start a new life in Spain, then Covid hit and I was not too careful with the money [from my house sale]. I started sleeping rough in Benidorm. I kept it a secret then I went to Alicante.
“I actually walked and cycled from Andorra, via Barcelona and Valencia before Benidorm, where I also slept rough. I ended up in Gibraltar, and worked there for 13 months and went to Portugal.
“Then, the police in Lisbon warned me to get back to the UK because of Brexit. I had €20 on me and it was only €7 to get a flight to Manchester. I continued to do the same things here as I did in Spain. Then, the Salvation Army saw me and they helped me get supported housing through Mustard Tree.”
"Honestly, there will be families begging"
The picture painted by rough sleepers on their individual situations is a grim one. But to understand the picture across Manchester, the M.E.N. spoke to one of the leading charities in the city tackling the issue — as well as a new not-for-profit trying to get people out of a cycle of homelessness where people get housed but end up back on streets because they can't afford it.
Both predict that the expected rise in homelessness by the end of the year will vastly overtake the 11 percent jump recorded by Shelter in the first three months of 2022.
Yvonne Hope is the CEO of Barnabus. The Bloom Street charity has supported the city’s forgotten for decades. Barnabus has always had its own red lines, though, in the way it looked after its clients. The situation this year is so bleak, however, staff have had no option but to cross those, Yvonne says.
“We are now doing what we said we would never do and giving out sleeping bags,” she explained in the office. “That was what we said would be failure.”
All around her, phone calls are ongoing. Arranging transport. Arranging hot meals. Arranging a bed for the evening.
"Landlords are charging top whack and it traps people"
It’s a hive of activity that’s pushing staff to the limit, Yvonne says — and most terrifyingly of all — she believes they’ve not seen the worst of it.
“The number of homeless families is going up and we are finding it harder and harder to get them any accommodation,” Yvonne continued. “We have one family where we had to ask them to sit in the Central Library.
“The rents are going up and up. Landlords are charging the top whack which they can get from DWP, that’s £625 per month per room in a shared house. That traps people — if 60 percent of your income goes on rent, how do you eat? Those people are on pre-paid meters and there’s very little help for them. You’re being penalised for being on a meter. All their money is going on rent. They are trying not to use the meters, so they come to us to ask for a shower.
“The number of people looking for a hot meal has gone through the roof. It’s untenable for us to cater for everyone. We always said we would but we just cannot anymore. How can you support rough sleepers when we have people in accommodation who cannot eat?”
Families are a concern for Yvonne now. In the main, homeless people on the streets in Manchester tend to be single men, or sometimes a couple. Families — with children — are seldom seen.
That’s changing, Yvonne said: “The number of families that are becoming homeless is going up. I think, honestly, there will be families begging. There will be kids that do not go to school or are only going there for food, but cannot take part because they are suffering from malnutrition.
“I think it will be more than 11 percent [rise in homelessness]. We don’t see that hidden homelessness. A lot of older people are becoming homeless. That’s frightening. It could mean we could see a rough sleeping population from five to 85.”
"Employers are crying out for people but the system is broken"
Yvonne and Barnabus are veterans of tackling homelessness in the city. Someone far newer to it is Eddie Radford, who heads up Standing Tall’s Manchester division.
Standing Tall is not a charity, it’s a not-for-profit company which pairs homeless people with a real living wage job and a host family for six months, in order to give someone a double hit and a proper chance to start afresh.
It’s a scheme which launched in Birmingham a couple of years ago, and four in five of the people they’ve helped have stayed in their job for more than a year. Like Yvonne, though, he thinks the Shelter predictions for the future are low.
“There will be 60-70,000 homeless people by 2024, according to Shelter. That’s a 40 percent increase,” he said. “I think it will go up even more. Manchester is arguably the best place city in the country for providing homelessness support, and even then five [homeless] people [I know are] working 60 to 70 hours a week volunteering.
“They are worse off if they get a full-time job. They are being advised not to because they generate more (rent) arrears in employment.”
Those arrears can come from coming off housing benefit and low wages not making up the difference, and a lack of affordable housing, Eddie believes. He continued: “No private landlord will take anyone on without a credible reference and to have a tenancy without a guarantor you need 30 times the monthly rent in annual earnings. The minimum amount someone can earn on the real living wage is about £19,000 a year.
“That would get you a £600 per month property. In Manchester that’s doable if you live in an HMO, or a small one bedroom flat on the outskirts.”
That’s going to become more difficult to obtain though, as the cost-of-living crisis becomes a harsher reality. Higher energy bills, higher food prices, and higher fuel costs will all make it harder for people to move on — so the availability of private tenancies suitable for people coming out of homelessness will fall, he added.
Eddie, however was optimistic that Standing Tall can make a dent in the numbers. Bruce, who the M.E.N spoke to, is a client of his, and said the work the company had done was ‘brilliant’.
Eddie thinks that his ‘two birds with one stone approach’ - help with employment and housing - might just be the way out of crisis for many. He went on: “The Ukraine refugee scheme has shown there are plenty of kindhearted people out there but it’s just a case of breaking the stigma with homelessness.
“We are not struggling to find jobs in this economy. There are plenty in hospitality and tourism and construction there crying out for people. We’re looking to get a wide range of jobs.”
Even then, though, his optimism is tempered by the reality of the ‘system’ in place. “I think the system is completely broken,” he said.
“It’s a mess at the moment. We have shown how you can get success in it but it needs to do better to get homeless people out of this cycle. If something does not change it’s going to get a lot worse. Homelessness will go up by an exponential amount.”
"We are doing all we can in Manchester… but we cannot do this alone"
The issues both individuals and the homelessness community are facing are well-known by Manchester City Council. Joanna Midgeley, the deputy leader of the council, who also heads up the city’s response to the issue, has told us as much.
She appeared before the Communities and Equality scrutiny committee last week (October 11). Documents for the meeting reveal a stark truth — more than 2,500 people presented as homeless to the council from May-August this year. Four years ago, it was around 1,500.
“There are some huge challenges still ahead with the cost of living crisis and the increasing presentations of homelessness,” Ms Midgeley told councillors. “I think we all agree that no one should be homeless and everyone should have the right to a safe and secure place to live.
“We are doing all we can in Manchester. We are trying to focus on prevention but we cannot do this alone. we have to have some action from the government. A lot of our presentations are from section 21 evictions, so we really need the housing allowance to be raised and we really need a ban on evictions this winter.”
The government has moved to ban the section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions in the Renters Reform Bill, but that’s just one aspect of incredibly complex and multifaceted issue.
No two people are the same, so no two responses to getting someone out of homelessness are the same, either. The work to do that and bring the levels of homelessness down in Manchester will take years, many believe.
But, for now, Colin is still cold, and he still does not want his family to see him.
Read today's top stories here.
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