You’ve said in your comment ‘I was fortunate to escape the cycle’. I was very fortunate, when I needed to leave home at sixteen, that I knew a very kind person who took me in, and just as important, a benefits system that supported me so that I could continue in education, right through to university. I wonder what would happen now to someone in a similar position.

I can’t do much to make things better. But I will keep representing York as a place where many people live who don’t frequent its ever more expensive bars and restaurants and don’t benefit from the massive spend on its ‘cultural offer’.

I now live in Nottingham and over the past 20 years, I’ve seen homelessness in this city grow to the point where the 3 homeless centres have had so much custom that they are now and have been for the past 4 years, completely full. The remnants of homeless men and women now sleep in whatever location, be it doorway or park bench, that they can get away with, while avoiding the attention of the police. I’ve worked at the Salvation Army hostel, after being a former resident; and I’ve worked at the Benefits Agency, where my job was to get as many homeless people off the unemployment register as possible, by using various sanctions: I’m proud to say that my contract wasn’t renewed due to ‘not being efficient enough in my role:’

Personally, I don’t have to worry about being homeless anymore but it does illustrate a good point: I was fortunate to escape the cycle because of good fortune, luck or whatever you’d like to call it but there are so many out there who are not as fortunate. We can carry on ignoring them, abusing them or pretending that it’s their own fault because they drink, smoke or fritter their money away while in the back of our minds, praying that it’ll never happen to us: but to some of us, it does. The general view of the homeless doesn’t bear resemblance to the truth. I’ve met men and women who became homeless due to family breakups; I’ve met a Bertie Bassett descendant with mental issues, who carried his inheritance in an old biscuit tin, under his jumper, strapped to his waist; I’ve met teenagers who left home to escape sexual abuse; I’ve met old men who’d been evicted because they couldn’t afford the rent: in short, I’ve met ordinary people who’ve fallen on hard times. We need to get away from this Victorian re-construction, propagated by the likes of Ian Duncan Smith and his rich mates of the deserving and the undeserving poor.