Veterans sleeping on the streets: this commitment is long-overdue
Homelessness and rough sleeping in city centres in particular across Yorkshire cannot be ignored, however difficult people may find it to contemplate helping people off the streets and into safe, secure, warm and dry accommodation.
And it isn’t a zero-sum game: helping rough sleepers off the streets is not something that has to cost the tax-payer and businesses money indefinitely. In truth, proactively tackling the problem more often than not results in fewer call-outs to emergency services and so fewer contacts with accident and emergency units and medical practitioners.
Helping people into a home, then a pathway of learning, training and working, is also shown to reduce the financial burden placed on the justice system, with rough sleepers not needing to resort to crime in their desperation.
Consideration must be given, too, difficult though it is to articulate the circumstances without sounding callous, to the cost that must be counted owing to those who feel they are unsafe in spaces where desperate people living in desperate circumstances occupy doorways and pavements. A growing number of young women in particular do not feel safe at night especially, a side-effect of which is the inevitable cooling of the night time economy.
It is therefore to be commended that Prime Minister Andy Burnham, during this period of remembrance, is writing to local authorities instructing them to outline how they are going about eradicating rough sleeping, with special emphasis placed on ensuring no veteran who has served in protecting the national security of this nation and its people has to sleep rough.