Homelessness won't go away!
In my earlier article 'Homeless and Hopeless?' I remarked that homelessness was a problem that wouldn't just go away. I suggested that no political party had the will to take steps that might lead to the eradication of this social scourge. Feeding 'Homelessness in the Tendring District' into the Google search engine produces a mass of statistics from which can be extracted a few facts that thoroughly justify those claims.
It appears that, during the latest period for which figures are available, the Municipal Year 2002/2003, 1,203 applicants for housing accommodation within the Tendring District claimed to be homeless. Only 33 percent of these were accepted as legitimate claimants – however it is a pretty safe bet that none of the rejected 67 percent were very satisfactorily housed.
Those described as 'eligible, unintentionally homeless and in priority need' may surely be regarded as having a desperately urgent need for a home. That number almost doubled in the six years between 1996 and 2003, from 212 in 1996/1997 to 312 in 1999/2000, to 403 in 2002/2003. What has it been during the Municipal Year soon coming to an end? If increases have continued at a similar rate it is probably over 700!
A blog reader who is involved in housing administration in the London area endorses my claims about the effects of the 'Right to Buy' legislation but adds another effect that I have to confess hadn't occurred to me.
Some former council houses that have been sold off at bargain-basement prices to former tenants are not now being resold but made available for letting. Why not - if that is what their new owners wish to do with them? And, of course, it adds to the number homes available to let, surely a very desirable outcome.
Quite so – but, in the nature of things, some of those new tenants will be of diminished means and eligible for housing benefit. This means that the local authority will be required to subsidise payment of the full market rental for homes that they have been compelled to sell off on the cheap!
A well-known politician remarked at the time, that Right to Buy would lead to 'the sale of the century'. And so it did – but it was the taxpayer and voter who were being sold a pup, and the homeless who were to suffer as a result!
………………………………………
Churches Together
This week (18th to 25th January) has been the week of prayer for Christian Unity during which Christians of all denominations and traditions remember that what unites them is much more important than the differences that divide them, and to pray that, as it says in the Book of Common Prayer, 'all who profess and call themselves Christian', may realize and appreciate their essential unity.
To this end there was an ecumenical service last Sunday evening to which all were invited, at St. John the Baptist's Church (Clacton's mother church) in Great Clacton, and there have been, throughout the week, services of prayer for unity at 10.00 a.m. in various constituent churches of 'Churches Together in Clacton', the body which represents our town's principal Christian traditions.
We oldies tend to go on – and on – about how much better people were 'before the war' (we always mean 'our war', World War II when we say that!)
than they are now.
Well, in some ways they were – but where ecumenism is concerned, there is no doubt about it, we are far, far better today. It is difficult nowadays, when we are all threatened by a tsunami of 'evangelising secularism', to believe the suspicion, distrust and fear that existed between the various Christian traditions in the 1920s and '30s.
My parents, and I of course, were members of what I suppose would be described as a very moderately 'high' Anglican Church on the outskirts of Ipswich.
Our principal service on Sundays was a Choral Eucharist at 11.00 a.m. at which at least some members of the congregation would genuflect and cross themselves at appropriate places. We also had an 8.00 a.m. non-choral Holy Communion (or 'mass') at 8.00 a.m. on Sundays and midweek, plus – of course – a well-attended Evensong at 6.30 p.m. every Sunday. I was first a choirboy and then a server until my call-up with the Territorial Army in 1939.
The priest in charge was a Scotsman, Rev. Donald Rae, who rather liked to be addressed as 'Father Rae' and wore a cassock and biretta when walking between his home and the church.
All of this was sufficient to attract the attention and condemnation of the Protestant Truth Society who, on at least two occasions that I can recall, mounted demonstrations at the church gate after evensong denouncing our 'Romish practices' and handing out leaflets telling members of the congregation where, in Ipswich, they
would find 'true Protestant' services.
It would be nice to be able to say that we offered a splendid example of tolerance and moderation, but it wouldn't really be true. We didn't hold demonstrations outside other churches, but I can remember, during a period of adolescent Anglo-Catholic fervour, referring to the Roman Catholic scathingly as 'the Italian mission' and dismissing all nonconformists as 'those narrow-minded chapel folk'! Quakers (and I have now been one for over half a century) hardly even entered my thoughts but I would, I am quite sure, have regarded them as beyond the pale!
My own 'conversion' to ecumenism began with the acquisition of a Methodist girl-friend (later to be my wife) on the day World War II broke out. It culminated a few months ago when I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England and 'came out' as being in dual membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and of the Anglican Church – a circumstance unusual even nowadays, but by no means unique.
………………………………………….
No comments:
Post a Comment