'I slept in a bin last night': Liverpool's homelessness crisis after emergency declared

In a cramped first floor room of a church building in Toxteth, a young woman is sat quietly on a chair, a look of anguish etched across her face.

The woman is from the east African country of Eritrea and doesn't speak any English. Today she is visiting the Merseyside Refugee Support Network charity, which is based in the St Anne Church in Overbury Street. She is in desperate need of help.

Through the charity's resident translator, Alhussein Ahmed, the woman tells the ECHO that for the past five nights she has been sleeping in the doorway of the KFC business in West Derby Road. "In the street it is cold and there is rain," she explains. "Drunk people approach me and I don't feel safe. I am scared a lot."

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Alhussein explains that the woman, who arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker, became homeless after she was granted right to remain in the country as a refugee. After this decision, she was evicted from her Home Office housing with nowhere to go. Asked why she had to leave Eritrea she shakes her head and states: "Long story. The government wanted to put me in prison."

This young woman is one of a huge number each day that are continuing to come through the doors of this small charity facing destitution and homelessness on the streets of Liverpool. The ECHO visited the building last year as charity bosses warned of a humanitarian disaster in the city - now things may be even worse.

In the room next door we meet a young man who we spoke to this time last year. He is from Sudan and when we last saw him he was sleeping in the car park of the Royal Liverpool Hospital. While he is no longer on the streets, his situation remains bleak.

Charity manager Seána Roberts explains that the man is now living in temporary accommodation, which amounts to a tiny room with just enough space for a bed and nothing else, not even a chair. He has nowhere to cook food or wash clothes. Seána regularly washes his clothes for him and as we are speaking she digs out a new winter coat to offer him from her diminishing supplies.

"It is essentially better than the streets but not much if you can’t wash your own clothes or cook your own food, which he hasn't been able to do for a year now," explains Seána. "He has a complicated story. He is a lost soul as a result of the trauma he has gone through in the past, but this is not a life he is living, he has now life."

When we spoke to Seána last year, she spoke of the overwhelming number of cases of homeless refugees she and her tiny team were now facing. She blamed the previous government's approach of racing through refugee decisions in order to cut down its enormous backlog, which forced desperate and vulnerable people out of their state-provided housing and onto the streets because of a lack of available accommodation in cities like this one.

There is now a change of government, but the problem has continued. Seána points to her notebook of appointments, the vast majority of which are highlighted in pink. "The pink ones are people who are homeless, imminently homeless or destitute," explains Seána. She says her team of four are each seeing an average of ten people each day who are in this position of crisis.

"I think this is an ongoing clearance of the previous government’s backlog, but still no one is joining the dots to see the impact it is having on local areas," she explains.

With often no housing solutions to direct people to, the charity has taken to handing out tents in a desperate bid to keep people warm as the temperatures in Liverpool drop below zero. "We're handing them out every week," explains Seána. "It all depends on how many we can get in, I only have three left at the minute," she adds, gesturing at a small pile in the corner of the office.

She adds: "Some people are too scared to contemplate lying down outside, whether in or out of a tent, so they just walk the streets at night, nipping in and out of places like Lime Street until they get moved on."

Speaking about how the work of her charity has changed in recent years to meet this crisis, Seána sighs, before explaining: "We used to just help people with their employability skills, languages and benefits - but we are back where we are a year ago. Nothing has improved in how the situation is managed. The system is just not functioning properly."

The charity's already thankless task was not helped in the summer when it became the target of the far-right riots. The church building, which houses the refugee network and partner charity Asylum Link was identified on the Telegram messaging app as a location for racist thugs to aim violence and vandalism towards as part of a country-wide plot. In the end, the violence did not materialise as the local community came out in force to defend the building - but the impact was huge.

"We had to close for three-and-a-half weeks," explains Seána. "We boarded up the building and were making plans for what we would do if the place was burnt down. We were still doing what we could to support people while working remotely but we in the end we had six weeks where we were not functioning properly and it had a knock on impact."

The situation involving homeless refugees in Liverpool is one key part of a wider crisis in the city. Last year Liverpool City Council declared a housing and homelessness emergency as the local authority became overwhelmed with cases of people losing their homes, without anywhere to turn.

The impossible situation Seána and her colleagues are facing is partly down the complete lack of housing options in the city. Just 1500 social housing properties become available each year in Liverpool and there are currently 13,000 people listed on the waiting list.

Liverpool Council, which is facing a budget blackhole of £28m this year, is struggling with the financial weight of placing people who it cannot find permanent housing for in temporary accommodation such as Bed and Breakfasts, that are often entirely inappropriate for their needs.

A total of 1,245 households are currently in temporary accommodation, which last year cost the council more than £21m – a staggering 12,000 per cent rise in the last five years. This year it is forecast to be £28 million.

Tragically, the numbers of those at the sharpest end of this emergency, the people now bedding down on the cold streets of this city, are also rising. The number of long-term rough sleepers in the city has risen by more than 40% in the past two years. Last month (October), an average of 29 rough sleepers were seen per night.

With temperatures dropping below zero this week, the situation has become even more difficult and dangerous for those on the streets. Walking through the city centre you cannot go far without seeing a tent or a person sat asking for help. Ray is 60-years-old, on a freezing Wednesday lunchtime he is huddled close to a shop in the busy Lord Street in Liverpool city centre as people rush by on lunch breaks or Christmas shopping trips.

This is the first time Ray has found himself on the streets and he is distraught, speaking to the ECHO through tears. "I went into hospital and because I didn’t declare it, I lost my benefits, my housing benefits - they sanctioned me. So they stopped all my money and I couldn’t afford to pay my rent," he explains.

"It’s absolutely f****** baltic at the moment. I go in shop doorways, behind the back of shops. I had to sleep in a bin the other night. I am just trying to get my benefits again so I can start paying rent. I’ve tried to get help but I’m on a waiting list."

Further along the street, 47-year-old Ian is sat shivering outside the city's flagship Liverpool One leisure complex. He has been homeless for two years now.

"I did have a place but I went to rehab and I got kicked out. When I came out I didn't have a place," he recalls. "It's so cold now, it's bad. I go here, there and everywhere. Its freezing." He says he has engaged with homelessness services but "there are no houses and I need a place."

For David Carter, who runs the city's leading homelessness charity, the Whitechapel Centre, the situation is as alarming as it is depressing. He confirms that the month of October was Liverpool's second worst ever in terms of overall numbers of rough sleepers with 182 bedding down on the city's streets - 34 of those had recently been given a refugee status decision.

"That is a very scary number but it isn’t the scariest number," explains David. "The scariest number is the number that remains out at the end of that month. At the end of October, we still had 106 of those people with no solution. It is so demoralising for our staff who can't find a solution for these people. It feels scary in terms of our ability to make things work."

"Rough sleeping is sadly where we have seen the biggest increase," David adds. "In the last financial year, of the 4,800 people who came through our doors needing help - which was a 10% increase on the year before - 1031 of those were seen sleeping rough. That's 22% of everyone who needed help."

"When you look at Liverpool’s figures, of those 1,031, 748 were seen in Liverpool. That’s a 33% increase in the city from the year before. So the biggest increase is in the most dangerous and acute form of homelessness. That is what is so wrong. That is really scary."

Cllr Sam East is the city council's cabinet member for housing. He spoke this week about the scale and cost of this ever-growing emergency. "It is a moral imperative in a rich country to get people off the streets and it is appalling that this is a conversation we have to have," he explained.

"It is absolutely untenable in the long-term and a huge amount of that cost is absorbed by emergency, temporary accommodation, which unfortunately often tends to be in Bed and Breakfasts. The council is doing a huge amount of work to try and bring down the amount of nights people are staying in this type of accommodation. It is simply not a suitable form of accommodation for people and is also a huge financial pressure for the council."

The council is now consulting on a new homelessness and rough sleeping strategy that it hopes will help to tackle the crisis over the coming years, but while a long-term plan is important, the dangers of homelessness are immediate.

This week, for the first time this year, the city council activated what is known as the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol, which comes into force when the temperatures drop below freezing. It means extra measures are put in place to get people off the streets and out of danger. Anyone who sees a rough sleeper during this period in Liverpool is urged to call the outreach team on 03001232041.