From The Guardian:
Homeless people in three coastal towns in Dorset could be fined for sleeping in doorways or leaving bedding and belongings in the street under proposals Conservative councillors are trying to push through...
But at a meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny board this week, Tory councillors claimed the measures did not go far enough. They argued that begging, loitering in a public place, causing an obstruction in shop doorways or car parks and leaving unattended personal belongings such as bedding or bags should also be included.
The Tory councillor Karen Rampton said strict rules were necessary. “We know that people leaving unattended belongings causes anxiety. Shopkeepers do not want people obstructing their doorways especially in these times of Covid.”
People who violate PSPOs are liable for £100 fines that, if left unpaid, can result in summary convictions and £1,000 penalties. Rampton said the idea of the PSPO was to counter antisocial behaviour rather than targeting a particular group.
Nothing
6 hours ago
14 comments:
They'd much rather flog them or put them in the stocks.
And presumably some of them sat round a table and actually discussed this. Maybe they had been sniffing the hand gel.
Related news. We have a number of charity clients and contacts. The sort of people who would normally offer help and accommodation to homeless and rough sleepers. All our charity contacts are reporting current and upcoming financial issues leading many to close, all down to the shutdown. Age Concern Suffolk has already closed. I doubt that the idiot Tories in your piece have understood this, and maybe don't even care. If they did they'd go and help the charities as a better way of dealing with this issue than sanctions.
For £100 you could buy a piece of marginal land and pitch a tent and live off the land, right? Oh wait, that's not allowed due to planning constraints and everyone who isn't a landowner has to pay a privately collected tax just to have somewhere to live
B, probably.
AKH, the mind boggles.
L, good point.
M, good idea. Local council choose a large field, builds a toilet and shower block, divides it up into pitches and let's everybody put up their tent. We could call it a "camp site".
Reminds me of the on-the-spot fines for drunk people.
RT, which provably worked. Since then, nobody has been out in public drunk and disorderly.
M. MW ...or a refugee camp? Could emigration be a solution? To Scotland? Or better, France? Perhaps we have discovered an commercial opportunity to assist?
L, it's about defanging Home-Owner-Ism by giving people a low cost option. Is it too much to ask that every UK citizen gets a UBI and the right to pitch a tent in a field/camp site at the outskirts of town?
A lot of homeless are homeless though no fault of their own - lose your job; girlfriend or landlord kicks you out; you run out of friends and family for couch surfing etc. Holding down a job is difficult if you have nowhere to sleep and wash.
L. Yep. Totally understand that. FWIW my office building is next door to s halfway house. We always have the less fortunate (and some downright appalling) people on our steps.
My comment was trying reverse the 'refugee camp' meme used by the not-anti-immigration mob.
L, that's the point of the low cost option, the police can move on the undesirables with a clean conscience instead of just moving on to nowhere in particular. And the innocent homeless will be able to get back to some semblance of normality.
And "tent" includes a car or camper van or whatever people have to hand.
B, they don't actually want to run them out of town. They want a few homeless people clearly visible at all times as a warning of what will happen if you don't pay your dues to the Home-Owner-Ists.
Watched a documentary about the Yorkshire Ripper the other evening. While it was mainly just wanting to have a go about (male) coppers airing their contempt and biases against women of "loose moral character" working the streets, it did point out the incredible stupidity of the Police's "thinking" as they chased down the Ripper - having already established the women were on the game because their family hadn't sufficient income for one reason or another, Plod decided that getting them off the streets would be good for the community and the women, and bad for the Ripper. So they had a blitz and arrested the women wholesale.
The women mostly seemed to be charging punters about a tenner - 1970s pricing, of course - and they end up in Court to get fined the equivalent of half a dozen or so, ah, encounters. So back on the street they go to earn the money. Rinse and repeat.
Political and policing stupidity never changes, it seems. They're all the same.
FT, I grew up in W Yorks in the 1970s, those ripper years were really horrible.
But yes, that was tackling symptoms not causes and so totally pointless.
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