From The Heart
Children leaving care are less likely to be homeless after Alan Robins shared his moving story with fellow councillors. Frank le Duc reports
More than 12,000 people are on the housing waiting list in Brighton and Hove. Fewer than a thousand properties became available for them last year. So when anyone tries to give one group of people greater priority over another, it can lead to a heated debate. And this is what has been happening with attempts by the council to do more to ensure a suitable home is found for children leaving care.
Perhaps the most powerful contribution to the debate came last week when one councillor shared his own experiences of being young and homeless. Alan Robins, a Labour member for South Portslade, said: “When I was 13 my father died and as a consequence my mother was ill and had to be taken into hospital for long-term care. I had to stay with my sister under a loose arrangement.
“At 16 I was on my own with just the clothes I stood up in and my records, which weren’t a lot of good as I had nothing to play them on. For the next seven to eight years I had to sleep on people’s couches and in their spare rooms – what would now be called sofa surfing.
“The difference was that this was in 1972. I had a job, friends and there was more of a sense of community. Now what it must be like I just can’t imagine. Forty years on I still find it difficult to talk about it. But if anyone thinks that by being a care leaver, when you’ve got nothing, you’re getting an unfair advantage, well, it doesn’t seem right to me.”
Unusually in the council chamber at Hove Town Hall there was a stunned silence. Council leader Bill Randall, a Green, does not always agree with his political rivals in the Labour Party. But he said afterwards: “I was very moved by Alan’s story. It confirmed my view that we need to do everything we can to help care leavers who are among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable in our city. One fact illustrates this point. Eighty per cent of all Big Issue sellers have been in care.”
His view was not universally shared by those at the meeting of Brighton & Hove City Council’s Housing Management Consultative Committee. Former Conservative council leader Mary Mears said: “We can all tell stories about housing need and some of them are very sad.” She questioned whether the change was being brought in as a way of shifting the cost of housing care leavers from the council’s general budget to the ring-fenced housing revenue account – at the expense of council tenants.
Her fears were shared by tenant representatives such as Stuart Gover and Chris Kift. Both expressed concerns that they had not been given a straightforward account by politicians and officials. The tenants voted against the change in the allocations policy. Theirs is not a binding vote. Unusually the politicians, who have the deciding votes, overruled them. Labour and Green councillors combined to give care leavers top priority and also voted through a set of amendments which included providing “robust support packages”.
Mr Kift stormed out of the meeting.
Councillor Robins, 55, said later: “I feel I can say, hang on, I know what’s happening here from personal experience. I’m not complaining about what happened to me at a young age. I would consider myself someone who came out of it relatively well. There was no one trying to take advantage of the situation which does happen now. And there were jobs. It must be so much harder for young people today.”
He said that he had just been trying to give his fellow councillors and the tenant reps an insight into how suddenly life could change for a child as it had for him. And he wanted them to appreciate the challenges facing someone leaving care at 18 years old. He may not have convinced everyone in the room about the need for a change in policy but, for a moment, he gave everyone pause for thought.
