By Marcus Hanley

‘Vagrancy in city centres and residential areas is a crime.

Oh, for God’s sake… We’re not vagrants. And this side of the seventeenth century, we use the term ‘homeless’’

Word on the Street, the second novel by Romy Wood, was published to acclaim in 2013 by Cillian Press, based in Manchester. Five years on, the book’s examination of the unequal footing between homeless people and the public in the UK remains relevant.

In Word on the Street, Wood imagines a Cardiff where homeless shelters are being quarantined because of an outbreak of Tramp Flu. The protagonist, Shona, helps run one of these shelters and looks to the return of her erstwhile lover, Dan, a charming grizzlyman-turned-journalist. They are reunited at a dilapidated clinic set up to treat homeless people, because the hospitals won’t accept them, and set out to discover the source of Tramp Flu.

Shona and Dan’s driving motivation is the perceived injustice against the homeless by subpar treatment, ‘a jam jar when you’re trying to keep wasps off your picnic’. Life-writing, hypochondria, and rescuer identity also feather this skeleton, but at core we see care workers trying to tackle the homeless community’s problem at root.

Meanwhile, the powers-at-be’s attempts, while not indifferent, compartmentalize the homeless in a bid to prioritize the public. Shona’s cloying but pragmatic boss, Gloria, is right that ‘it’s sensible to separate people’, but when the jam jar is less a hospitable isolation ward than an ‘alarmingly blank, windowless’ warehouse, one smells not just ‘stagnant water’ but scales and fins as well. Admittedly, Shona and Dan’s stance does veer into government conspiracy, but later we see a schoolgirl of fixed abode with suspected Tramp Flu being properly hospitalized.

This sidelining-not-solving approach is mirrored today’s UK, but rather than flu it is the simple crime of being homeless. Vagrancy laws have existed in England since 1824. Much has changed in that time: convicts stopped being shipped off and Scotland repealed the entire Vagrancy Act. But England and Wales still retains the whiff of criminalization.

Indeed, Thomas Zagoria writing for New Statesman reports: ‘In 2016/17, a Freedom of Information request reported 1,810 prosecutions under the act’. The above quoted exchange is between a policeman and Shona, the latter’s exasperation with the anachronistic wording revealing the gulf between the enforcers and those they seek to enforce. Further still, it would seem that those attempting to solve homelessness find no modern place for vagrancy laws. Shona is not alone here.

The Pavement is a small charity running since 2005 with the sole purpose of informing and advising the homeless. Managing Editor Karin Goodwin, said: “Criminalization of homelessness is extremely unhelpful, not only for those who find themselves in difficult circumstances but also for society as a whole… Instead, we need to work with people to understand why they are on the streets in the first place.”

Yet, Public Safety Protection Orders (PSPOs) exist. Introduced in 2014 with the advent of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, they are roughly defined as banning that which has a “detrimental effect of the quality of life of those in locality.” Drinking alcohol out on the streets, for instance, is an example. That doesn’t seem unreasonable. Rough sleeping and begging have also made the list though, with a £100 fine on top. If the paper cup doesn’t yield that amount, a £1000 fine will follow and a criminal conviction to boot.

When the homeless were afflicted in Word on the Street, the usual short shrift wasn’t cast aside in favour of the best conditions for healing. Instead, the official response takes place in a ‘derelict industrial estate’.  So too must be the feeling of your brute survival being dealt pointing fingers and not pick-me-ups.

PSPOs seek to ban that which has a detrimental effect of the quality of life of those in locality. Of course, if you recognize the homeless as being people simply without homes, then perhaps a PSPO could be inserted to rebuke PSPOs. The early days met resistance from the people when Hackney Council when set up such a thing. The Protection Order was retreated after such a vocal outcry.

You may have heard of that event already. You may be familiar with PSPOs and the effect it has on those living precariously. That brings us up to now.

There are those that think PSPOs won’t further alienate the homeless. John Blundell believes that they will rescue vulnerable people from the ‘modern slavery’ of organized crime. In this scenario, the police become primed to release beggars from the bonds they cannot escape from and the fines to be used to fund Andy Burnham’s Homelessness Fund. Rochdale Council’s online summary of their 2017 meeting concerning PSPOs echoes a similar sentiment.

As Manchester residents, what do you think? Will you resist the Orders like the people or Hackey or do you think PSPOs push away to pull back in?

Petition to repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/205388

Andy Burnham’s Homelessness Fund: www.gofundme.com/gm-mayoral-fund