The life of a St Mungo's Outreach worker

Imagine it’s 6am, and instead of being tucked up in bed you’re on a chilly pavement, crouching by a sleeping bag, calling to the person inside to wake up to see if you can help them. This is the life of a St Mungo’s outreach worker.

During winter, outreach workers have to be prepared for SWEP: Severe Weather Emergency Protocol, when temperatures go below freezing (or above 30C).

Outreach workers rush to the streets to offer emergency accommodation which is made urgently available by the local authority. While there’s no legal obligation for local authorities to provide shelter during SWEP, it’s generally taken to be a moral one, and most authorities provide it.

But it’s hardly a perfect system, explains Ealing Outreach Co-ordinator Ewa Mou-Balham.

How do people react when they’re given hot drinks and warm clothes?

“Extremely happy,” says Ewa. “Sometimes when we go out, they’re fed up and say, ‘Why are you waking me up?!’ But when it’s cold, absolutely everyone is waiting for us. A lot of clients then change their minds and decide to engage with us, which feels great.”

But lately, Ewa’s team has been seeing more newcomers to the streets, “Last night we found 25 people sleeping rough – eight of them were new.”

Often, newcomers are refugees who have just been granted permission to stay in the UK.

The wait often stretches beyond months into years, and once it’s granted, they’re given an incredibly short amount of time to leave their government-provided room – officially they have 28 days, but in practice they usually only have a week or two; certainly not enough time to find a job and a place to live.

"When the temperature goes above freezing, SWEP ends. People have to leave the emergency accommodation at 9am, even though it's often still incredibly cold."

Which means they go from being refugees to being homeless. Ewa explains, “Most of them don’t speak English and are scared to ask for a job. Often, they were still at school when they had to flee their home country, so find themselves on the streets with no work experience whatsoever.”

Ewa says her team’s greatest difficulty is that as rough sleeping increases, they find their hands tied: foreign nationals (who account for about half of people sleeping rough in urban areas) need to have been in the UK for a full 20 years before they have recourse to public funds.

Not having the right to work leaves people vulnerable to exploitation.

“Three years ago we found 17 people sleeping in just five rooms,” says Ewa. “The landlord was letting them stay for free, while working for him for £100 a week. If they had the right to work, he couldn’t do that.”

Having no recourse to public funds also means having to pay for non-emergency medical care. “We had a client who needed his plaster cast changing and we were told it would cost £2,000,” she says. We couldn’t pay that, so he removed it by himself.”

Ewa notes that the government has been promising an end to homelessness ever since she started working with St Mungo’s. Four and a half years into the job, there are now more rough sleepers than when she started.

Ewa says if she could change one thing, it would be the rules for foreign nationals.

“If someone has been here 10 years illegally, they should have the right to work, not be forced to work illegally and be taken advantage of,” she says.

“They’re skilled. If the government said, ‘Show us you can pay taxes and look after yourself’, most of them would come off the streets.”

It’s the success stories that keep you going in any job – for Ewa, one that sticks in her mind was a client who’d been sleeping in a forest for seven years. “We helped get him training and a job,” she says. “Now he’s not drinking anymore, he’s in private rented accommodation, and I hear he’s saved enough for a deposit to buy a flat – though somewhere outside London, obviously!”

We really can finish with homelessness, Ewa insists, and St Mungo’s can play a big part.

What we do for migrants and refugees

We are backing calls for the government to extend the move-on period for newly recognised refugees from 28 days to 56 days
We help clients access the paperwork they need to gain support from the local authority
We support clients to apply for Universal Credit as soon as possible
We support their mental health: many people have been waiting a long time and experienced significant trauma. Receiving status should be a positive experience, and we try to make sure they navigate the bureaucracy with as little stress as possible
We provide additional support with attending appointments

We help to link clients to wider community networks to ease their settling in the UK

You can find out more at here.

The life of a St Mungo's Outreach worker

The life of a St Mungo's Outreach worker

How do people react when they’re given hot drinks and warm clothes?

Not having the right to work leaves people vulnerable to exploitation.

What we do for migrants and refugees

Other articles from this issue

The life of a St Mungo’s Outreach worker

“The cold still haunts me.”

18 winters homeless: William’s story

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