I hope Andy Burnham has ruined my Christmas

For quite some time, every year I volunteered at Crisis – the homelessness charity that brings people in from the streets for a fortnight every Christmas. It was exhausting, demanding and incredibly fulfilling work.

I worked a very particular shift – which was the way Crisis tended to work. I did not just work at one particular centre – I worked the afternoon shift at The Gate. The way that tended to work meant that while new people would volunteer every year, others would return to the same shift at the same centre year after year. This is our story and my reflections on that story.

The Gate was not a physical place. It was the name of one of a number of different centres dotted around London. Each offered a slightly different service so that a range of guests could be served. At The Gate, among Crisis volunteers we had a slightly but not wholly unearned reputation as ‘tough nuts’. This was because The Gate was a ‘wet centre’ – where guests were allowed to bring in their own alcohol. This was essential for reaching those guests who, if they had been faced with a choice, would have chosen to stay on the streets in order to be allowed to drink. Our guests were – not to put too fine a point on it – pissed. Which added its own complexities.

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We had a running joke among the volunteers that at the start of the week, we would arrive bright-eyed and bushy tailed while the guests were tired and bedraggled. Over the week, we would do at least four and, for many, seven eight-hour hard-working shifts. Meanwhile our guests would first of all get some much-needed, uninterrupted and safe sleep. Then they would get new clothes and have the ones they owned laundered, see the hairdressers and nail technicians (all volunteers), get three meals a day, and space to be social and safe to sit (with their booze) listening to Christmas music and feeling like human beings. By the end of the week, with knackered volunteers and guests who had been rested and given the chance to look their best, the difference between the two groups had changed dramatically.

There were also more interventionist services available. Volunteers from Alcoholics, Narcotics and Cocaine Anonymous, volunteers from Crisis and Searchlight who could signpost guests to services they were entitled to that would help them get off the streets.

Because of the more complex lives and addictions of our guests, we did not have the kind of success rates of some other Crisis centres. The earlier you can intervene in street homelessness the more likely you are to get people off the streets. Those whose lives were disordered enough to feel The Gate was their only option were not the easiest targets for this kind of intervention.

But every year, alongside some of our favourite returning guests (who we all got to know quite well over the years) we did have a few genuine success stories. And for all the other guests we made a brief and very human difference to their lives that they valued enough to return to year after year.

I will never forget the year one of the senior volunteers (known as ‘green badgers’ internally) read us a letter from a couple who had stayed with us. She was a wheelchair user and the pair had recently got engaged. They had been living in a bin store. Both were heavy drinkers. This couple took advantage of every single service on offer – and it worked. They had been found a place to live and ongoing support. In their letter (there wasn’t a dry eye as it was read) they promised to come back and pay it forward the following year. Those two were my favourite returners. Because they did come back – not as guests, as volunteers.

Because of the nature of our guests we didn’t get that many celebrity visits as these couldn’t be photographed because it was clear that inebriated guests couldn’t consent.

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But we got a few. As mentioned earlier The Gate moved around – for most of my volunteering it was held in schools but moved to hotels during Covid. One year it was in Islington and, to his great (and not public) credit, the local MP Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, turned up with his friend Stormzy. The latter brought bags and bags of Adidas clothing for the guests who then spent the rest of the week in fresh new designer gear – making the school canteen and playground look like a very odd advert.

The people I dealt with at Crisis were funny and annoying, difficult and helpful, naive and self-aware (the picture illustrating this piece is the unofficial logo for the centre designed by one of the guests. The badges were created by a volunteer for us to wear to show our support for our centre’s team during the inter-centre football tournament). They were all ages, all races, predominantly, but not wholly, male (there were separate women-only centres). They were human beings. I loved working with them.

In my time volunteering at Crisis I made a number of friends who I hope will be part of my life for the rest of my life. Volunteering became a very important part of my year. In the years where I have been unable to do it I felt an empty longing – something very real was missing. 

I hope that today’s announcement will ruin these Christmases for me permanently. Andy Burnham making dealing with homelessness his first pledge on the steps of Downing Street and now following that up with action, money and – most importantly – political direction gives me hope for more boring Christmases going forward and more help for all those sleeping rough. This isn’t going to be easy. My experience at The Gate tells me that there are all sorts of complexities around reaching the hardest to help. But the Housing First approach that Burnham brought introduced in Greater Manchester works with these complexities in mind. Scaling this up as a national ambition with local delivery is the kind of ambitious scheme that will change many, many lives. I will take the deal of swapping my joy at volunteering for the difference this will make to the lives of the people I volunteered for.

I am not naive. This will not happen overnight and it will have setbacks and difficulties. Opponents will point at these and claim it means the programme doesn’t work at all. But that isn’t how progress works. Progress can be frustratingly slow.

But setting high ambitions and getting as close to them as you can is still progress. Never let anyone tell you – or the guests at The Gate – that it doesn’t matter. 

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