Action on poverty

Each year, the poverty and homelessness action week, 25th of January - 2nd of February, takes a theme and this year its ‘Standing alongside people in crisis’. Our hope is to encourage solidarity and challenge the culture of division and scapegoating that is becoming so prevalent. It’s an invitation to stand with, rather than divided, against one other and especially with our neighbours struggling with poverty and housing need.

The action week theme is timely. More and more people find themselves unable to make ends meet and in crisis, particularly because of the rising cost of housing and the reduced benefits safety net. Housing benefit caps and the bedroom tax disproportionately affect younger people and families. Now we must also include the so called squeezed middle, such as people in their twenties for whom home ownership is an increasingly distant aspiration as house prices continue to rise faster than wages or savings, and who are forced to pay an ever higher amount of their incomes for soaring private rents. The proportion of society effectively caught and impoverished in the new austerity keeps growing.

As the public safety net of care is cut, churches find themselves increasingly on the front line and required to respond to community needs. Food banks for people unable to make their incomes stretch far enough are just one example. Churches are also responding directly to homelessness, such as by launching winter night shelters and buying and providing accommodation which is actually affordable to people on benefits.

Housing Justice is involved in providing practical support to churches trying to respond to homelessness in both of these ways. Churches are also branching out into the provision of debt advice surgeries to address the rising burden of personal debt and its most costly variant, targeted quite deliberately and cynically on the most financially vulnerable, the pay day loan.

The action week campaign also challenges the increasingly hostile public discourse; the ways in which people in poverty are increasingly blamed and stigmatised in today’s Britain. My colleague Alastair Cameron of Scottish Churches Housing Action spoke out recently on a case in point: ‘Channel 4’s Benefits Street programme shows why we need to stand alongside people in poverty. The storm of abuse it has whipped up is based on prejudice, on the part of both TV commissioners and the general public. Churches are part of the communities where benefit claimants and homeless people live, and know the realities behind sensationalist media coverage.’

Alistair Murray is the director of projects for Housing Justice

Housing Justice has arranged an Action Week debate on ‘Housing for the Common Good’ on Wednesday January 29^th 6.00pm in the hall of St George’s Cathedral in Southwark. The debate will be led by David Orr of the National Housing Federation, with Housing Justice’s Alison Gelder and Bishop Pat Lynch of the Catholic Diocese of Southwark.

To see a map of all the events taking place across the UK click here.

To read more about food poverty click here.