20.01.08
Tendring Topics
Homeless and Hopeless?
Memories of Christmas are fast beginning to fade – but I hope that all readers of this blog had as happy and fulfilled a Christmas as I did, wanting for nothing, surrounded by friendship and love, and with my family all around me.
Nowadays, in many people's minds, Christmas is, primarily a festival for children. Yet, according to the campaigning Christian homelessness charity, Housing Justice, over 150,000 British children will have spent the holiday in temporary accommodation and can therefore have been expected to have had a less-than-happy time.
Homelessness is a problem that just won't go away – and the current increase in the number of possession orders for non-payment of mortgages suggests that next Christmas the number of homeless, temporarily accommodated, and unsatisfactorily housed families will be even higher.
Next Sunday (27th January) has been designated Homelessness Sunday. Homelessness, in all its forms, will be the subject of thought and prayer at over 2,000 churches of every Christian tradition, throughout England, Scotland and Wales. I hope that as we pray for the homeless, we will remember Saint Theresa's contention that in this world God has no hands but ours to do his work, no feet but ours to run his errands. I am inclined to think that if St Theresa were living today, she would have added – and no bank accounts but ours to fund his purposes!
We Clacton Quakers, at our annual Meeting for Carols and by after-meeting collections every Sunday in December, raised over £150 for the residents of Derek Crosfield House in St. Paul's Road, Clacton, which provides temporary accommodation with help and support for inexperienced young mothers and their babies. In other areas there are no doubt similar local charities that can be supported.
Then there are national charities aimed at helping the homeless. Housing Justice I have already mentioned. Another, that for obvious reasons, comes instantly to my mind is Quaker Housing Action. This is a charity that Clacton Quakers have supported for many years and has been of special interest to my family.
My two sons and I have all been involved as local government officers with the problems of homelessness. What's more, throughout our sixty years of marriage, Heather and I retained vivid memories of having trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham, after my demob from the army in 1946, seeking furnished rooms in which to live while I attended a government course for ex-service personnel at what was then Battersea Polytechnic.
Housing Justice urges the Government to take urgent action to build more affordable family housing. I'm just a little hesitant about urging political action because all too often Government action produces effects quite different from those that we must assume had been intended. When the 'right to buy' legislation was first enacted to compel local authorities to sell off their housing stock at knock-down prices to sitting tenants, a cynical friend of mine remarked that it was a brilliant wheeze to buy votes with other people's money!
Be that as it may, I cannot believe that the government's intention was to ensure that less-than-wealthy young couples in rural areas would for ever be unable to find a home in villages in which their families had lived for generations; that local councils (who still had a duty to house the homeless!) would be left without the means of doing so; that former tenants now owner-occupiers, or beneficiaries under their wills, whose homes had been bought at bargain-basement prices, would be able to resell them after a few years for the spiralling value that they quickly achieved; and that the consequent shortage of affordable housing accommodation for letting would be a significant factor in producing runaway inflation of house prices.
I believe that any government that seriously wishes to solve the problem of homelessness must first admit (whether or not political and economic theory suggests otherwise) that private enterprise and voluntary housing associations simply cannot fill the gap left by the local authorities. It was, after all they who had cleared the slums and kept homelessness at bay for a century. Then the 'right to buy' (I prefer to think of it as 'compel to sell') legislation would have to be repealed or drastically amended to permit local authorities to build and manage homes for letting. They themselves would have the right to sell, or not to sell them to tenants, depending on what was best for the communities that they had been democratically elected to serve. What may be right for Walton-on-Thames could well be quite wrong for Walton-on-the-Naze.
No – it isn't going to happen. Which is why I shall save my energies for trying to raise funds for such organisations as Quaker Housing Action which devote their funds to trying, in small ways, to facilitate the housing of the homeless, and to make the lives of those they cannot help in this way a little less miserable than they would otherwise have been.
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Thirty days hath September……….
I note that 2008 is a leap year and that consequently February has 29 days, something that I should have known without having to look at a calendar. It happens whenever the last two numbers of the year, in this case 08, are divisible by four. A somewhat legalistic colleague of mine used to complain, not entirely seriously, that on these years those of us who were paid an annual salary were expected to do 366 days work for 365 days pay!
Do you know, without thinking about it, how many days there are in any particular month of the year? Some people, I know, work it out using the knuckles of their hands – a process that is easier to demonstrate than to describe!
When I really need to, I use the little rhyme that I learnt as a child. Do children still learn it I wonder:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
Which hath but 28 days clear –
With twenty-nine in each leap year.
If children do learn it, I expect that they are taught to say 'has' instead of 'hath', as with the prayers in modern prayer books.
Somehow, to my ancient ears, that doesn't have quite the same ring!
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