Long road home: Sleeping rough is a symptom of deeper distress

I 'm sitting in a smoke-filled room in a converted house near King's Cross, talking to three of London's young homeless - Gary, Yo and Denny. They're telling me all about 'taxing' - even among rough sleepers the strong prey on the weak, taking a percentage of the few pounds they've begged that day.

I've started my research into young home-lessness and, while this sort of detail is invaluable, I have just encountered my first genuinely arresting truth: Yo and Denny were in care before sleeping rough - and together they form part of the 40 per cent of young homeless who have been. Combine that with the national figure of 0.2 per cent of children who are in care at any given moment and you realise that a childhood spent, even partially, in care (whether fostering or a children's home) makes you 68 times more likely to end up on the streets.

What I'm slowly learning is that sleeping rough, especially among the young, isn't about Not Having A Home. If anything, it's about the streets being the best possible place to be.

For me, this started one night, walking from Covent Garden to Charing Cross after a BBC radio drama conference at the Theatre Museum. I was fired up to continue my proposed trilogy on the young in 1990s Britain, but wondering what the next subject should be. A Great Gulf Fixed, focused on a young boy's inevitable slide into offending on a south London sink estate - the sort I drive past every day. But this time the subject was sleeping in the doorways I was walking past.

Armed with a title (continuing the biblical theme, My Bed In The Darkness, Job 17) and a commission, I was suddenly drawn up short. I knew I was as angry as the next man about this bubo that had broken through London's streets, but I realised I knew next to nothing about why these kids were there and in such numbers.

Income Support had been scrapped for 16 to 18-year-olds, but surely that couldn't explain it all? I embarked on a crash self-education course, visiting agencies dealing with the young homeless. What I encountered hidden behind the young people sleeping rough by night and hamming ('ham-and-egging') by day was an army of hard-working, surprisingly cheerful, relentlessly smoking social workers.

Which is how I came to be chatting with Gary, Yo and Denny in the smoking room of an agency called Alone in London. Many new arrivals in the capital are referred to or discover this cluster of offices. Such agencies constituted another step forward in my research: I had thought homelessness a disease caused purely by the lack of a home, to be cured by the provision of one.

Near the end of my research, I find homelessness, while horrific and shaming, is nearly always a symptom of a far deeper distress which will need more than a roof to banish. It needs support, friendship, counselling and infinite patience. And it is agencies such as Alone in London that seek to provide it. Don't picture this as a night shelter or a soup kitchen; to look at, it could be your GP's surgery. In the drop-in reception room: oatmeal carpet, a pine coffee table with the day's tabloid newspapers and magazines fanned across and comfortable chairs spaced round the walls. On these sat people under 21 waiting to see their key workers.

I had always presumed the foot soldiers in the war against homelessness were those dispensing soup at the Waterloo Bull Ring or manning night shelters. While that 'sharp end' work is indispensable, key workers guide these young people through the maze of possibilities and requirements. They might arrange for a client to get a bed in a night shelter but, as you can only have 14 consecutive nights there, you need help come the fifteenth.

It is during these stays that the key worker will try to find a medium-term hostel, where the client can stay for maybe three months. And during that stay, if temper and frustration don't result in a disappearance back to the streets or worse, the key worker will seek a longer-term solution. Nor does this effort kick in only when a young person is sleeping rough. At St Christopher's Fellowship I met key workers who focus on those still in care, preparing them for independent living, hoping to buck the trend.

It is not surprising those who have been entirely deprived of any 'home' life do not know how to live in a home, how to budget. And yet some local authorities still use cash grants to entice over-16s in their care to leave.

At one of St Christopher's semi-independence training houses, I met four key workers and a manager who supervise seven residents. What does their work principally consist of, I asked. 'Listening,' was the unanimous answer.

But for those who slip through the net or are not lucky enough to have such independence training (it can easily cost pounds 800 a week), there are agencies such as Alone in London, finding clients on the street and working to move them on and, ultimately, into their own flat.

These key workers spend their time page-turning through the chunky ring-binder that lists all the establishments offering accommodation to the homeless, listing their quota of beds, their restrictions on type of client and length of stay. A wipe-board above the mantelpiece lists current availabilities in special hostels offering medium-term places: there's a space for one gay man here or two Asian females there. Between phone calls to hostels and acrimonious meetings with local authority housing officials, they try to gain clients' trust and discover what it is that has forced them on to the streets.

Of course, that withdrawal of Income Support is the crucial, final straw that puts them there, but why aren't they at home? If a child (under 18, as termed by the Act) cannot live with his/her parents, who's fault is it - parent or child? Ask yourself: who should be making the greater effort to resolve the crisis - parent or child?

Now consider the latest housing Green Paper proposal which would brand any child thrown out of home as 'intentionally homeless' and so barred from waiting lists. Most workers I met were rendered speechless with rage and frustration trying to fathom the rationale.

Day after day these key workers handle children - whatever their age they are really still children - whose scars and accumulated insecurities mean that the road back to a settled, housed existence is going to be long and, usually, painful.

Children whose trust has been repeatedly betrayed, if not shattered, cannot easily accept the rules and self-discipline to get through the rehousing system. To work up and out of the night shelter life, to wait for longer-term accommodation and take all the knock-backs, requires a sense of self, a driving purpose that has long ago been hounded out of most of them.

And after listening to a string of stories, any one of which would give most of us an abiding sense of anguish and hopelessness for days, how do these key workers end the day? Having debriefed with colleagues, they go home and forget about it. Next morning they're back for another round. These are the real heroes of the homelessness crisis.

Jonathan Myerson's play is due for broadcast on Radio 4 next March; his episode of 'The Billabout 'taxing is on ITV on 9 August.

(Photograph omitted)