Thirty percent of the world’s population lives without electricity. Some get

by with city lights (in India, many schoolchildren study under streetlamps). But elsewhere even

public lighting can be a luxury. “My children do their homework when there is still light,” says Tanka

Bahadur Dani, 29, of Gorkha, Nepal. “Going out to the toilet in the dark becomes a problem. There’s

always a danger of falling down the slopes. Once we eat supper we go to bed, but that doesn’t mean you go to sleep immediately.” Apparently not. According

to Nigeria’s Federal Office of Statistics, women living without lights or TV average one child more

than women with electricity at home.

THE IMPORTANCE

OF ELECTRICITY

NO RETURN TO CARDBOARD CITYBy Jeremy Swain

It’s been a bitter February. The outreach teams have been out in force across Britain’s cities assisting rough sleepers to come inside. Bizarrely, even in -5 degrees some people remain implacable in their determination to stay in the shop doorway. According to some observers this is a ‘lifestyle choice’ though I tend to agree with @aibaihe, a particularly insightful tweeter who, after almost two constant years of rough sleeping, reflected recently: ‘I have never met anyone on the street who didn’t want to live inside’. Thankfully hundreds of rough sleepers did escape the streets during the cold patch as Severe Weather Emergency Protocols or SWEP were triggered and additional beds made available. Despite this monumental effort there exists a corrosive cynicism about the work undertaken with rough sleepers by outreach teams. They are sometimes called

“RECENTLY RELEASED GOVERNMENT FIGURES ON

ROUGH SLEEPING SUGGEST THAT NUMBERS ARE ON THE INCREASE”

‘government funded’ outreach teams, this being a pejorative term. I remember how, in the 1980s, we tirelessly campaigned to force government to take seriously the issue of rough sleeping by funding street outreach teams in the certain knowledge that the money was not going to come from shaking collection tins at railway stations. We were realists. Rough sleepers sometimes smell and occasionally do bad things. They do not have the premium brand of innocence carried by aged donkeys or baby seals. So I watch our street teams girding up for another street shift, already red-eyed and exhausted after too many late nights and mull over with considerable resentment the detail of yet another phone call from an intrepid journalist who, like the gaggle before him, wanted to discuss the rumour that we are trying to ‘clear the streets for the Olympics’.The same journalist inquiring about pernicious attempts to clear the streets moved effortlessly on to the other story, the increase in rough sleeping, the prevailing orthodoxy being that society no longer cares and we are returning with grim inevitability to the days of ‘cardboard city’ when vast numbers of people congregated together to sleep in parks and under bridges. But I cannot agree that things have got worse, indeed in many ways they have got immeasurably better and our

responses more humane. In 1986 during one of the coldest Februarys for decades I remember leaving the Embankment in central London at 2.00am in the morning in the knowledge that around 80 men and women were that night consigned to sleeping fitfully on the pavement or in the two red telephone boxes nearby. There was no SWEP provision in those days. Twice during my four years as an outreach worker those boxes were opened in the morning by street cleaners for them to find the frozen body of a dead rough sleeper. Then it felt as if we grieved alone, with the death of a rough sleeper barely rippling the surface of local authority consciousness. Today the death

of a person sleeping rough is treated with considerably greater seriousness, frequently subject to detailed investigation and is always a matter of remorse and regret.Recently released government figures on rough sleeping suggest that numbers are on the increase. Unfortunately the government has trapped itself into reporting on rough sleeping through a mechanism which mixes ‘snapshot’ street counts with local authority estimates, a flawed, inconsistent approach producing essentially inconsequential numbers.