Welcome to the The Plague Pit – issue number 9.

I’m delighted that another guest author is paying her first visit today to the site. Rose Morley is an undergraduate studying English Literature. She writes on social issues for The Isis. For this edition of The Plague Pit, she has kindly sent us this article about the impact of COVID-19 on her homeless friends

On March 23^rd of this year, 27 million people turned on their TVs to watch Boris Johnson give one of the most important and anxiously awaited broadcasts in modern British history. Citing Coronavirus as ‘the biggest threat this country has faced for decades’, the Prime Minister went on to give the country ‘a very simple instruction’ in how to fight the virus. The instruction was ‘You must stay at home’.

Immediately, the virus that had already ravaged Italy turned from a vague threat wafting over the country to a terrifying reality, driving people out of pubs, restaurants, parks and playgrounds, into the shelter of their houses. However, for Adrien and Theodora, an elderly homeless couple that have lived on the streets of Oxford for over a decade, this instruction is far from ‘simple’. With the streets now deserted and joblessness bringing those who might have previously spared their change into states of financial instability, they find themselves in a more vulnerable position than ever before.

When weighted by population, the town of Oxford has some of the worst statistics concerning homelessness in the UK. Between 2013 and 2017, 33 homeless people died on Oxford’s pavements, giving it the second worst figures in the country for this time period. Despite this, Adrien and Theodora are proud to call it their home. Having originally been drawn to settle in this particular town by their admiration for J R Tolkein, and the knowledge that he himself lived most of his life there, the couple have since carved out a life for themselves in that same place, despite the difficulties of homeless living.

Adrien and Theodora enjoy a wide range of friendships with students and local workers, who provide them with not just food and financial aid, but also with company, conversation and a feeling of community. However, whilst Adrien and Theodora may not be able to ‘stay at home’, the majority of this support network can and must obey this government order.

Students have gone back to their parents, workers are working from home, and even the charity organizations that try to provide them with food each night have stopped their operations for fear of infecting those who live on the streets, whose immune systems are likely to have been greatly weakened over the years. For people who survive almost entirely on the sporadic kindness of a thriving community, the sudden and dramatic disappearance of this community is a terrifying thing to deal with.

However, within a few days of Johnson’s lockdown announcement, The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) assured the public that it was “redoubling its efforts” to make sure that all rough sleepers were “inside and safe” during the pandemic. Luke Hall, the current housing minister, quickly wrote to local councils urging them to take steps to find places to temporarily house their homeless people, informing them: ‘Our strategy must be to bring in those on the streets to protect their health and stop wider transmission’.

Adrien and Theodora were quickly offered a room at an empty hotel in town, an effort which they appreciated. However, the pair feel that they are in the dark as to what their fate over the course of the next few months shall be. The council does not willingly provide them with any information as to how long they are likely to be housed for, and review their situation on a near daily basis.

This leaves them in constant fear of being suddenly asked to leave, despite the fact that the hotel cannot be expecting to function commercially for many months. Food is scarce and infrequent at the hotel, and without the donations that they usually receive from the public, they are unable to supplement what they are given.

Adrien and Theodora also report that the hotel in which they have been placed is empty aside from themselves and one other homeless man, despite the fact that many people remain unhoused and untouched by The Ministry of Housing’s promises.

Speaking to Angela, a young homeless woman in Oxford, I found that there is widespread confusion within the homeless community here as to the legitimacy of the government’s efforts to provide shelter for the homeless as this pandemic plays out. ‘We don’t know how they pick them’ she tells me, a sentiment echoed by another homeless man that I talk to the next day.

Whilst the government has made loud claims about the generous support being given to the homeless in this difficult time, it seems that this support has not been extended to the vast majority of Oxford’s homeless residents in any way at all. Despite the many empty rooms in Adrien and Theodora’s hotel, there have apparently been no efforts to offer these rooms to other members of the homeless community. On the streets of Oxford, an overwhelming number of vulnerable people are still struggling, unable to self isolate and lacking in the support that they might usually receive from local people and community initiatives.

This puzzling reality of the empty and disused hotel existing on the same street on which Angela sits begging for shelter is by no means a Coronavirus-specific phenomenon. A survey in late 2018 by the Centre for London discovered that the floor space of unused buildings amounted to about 1.8 million sq m (2,700 hectares) of land in London alone, contained in around 20,000 commercial properties, 11,000 of which had been abandoned for over two years. And yet, in a society that views shelter as a means to profit and not as a basic necessity, homeless people are left to die on the streets rather than allowed into these empty spaces.

Whilst the government’s assurance that homeless people would be housed and adequately supported throughout the pandemic was initially encouraging, the situation in Oxford appears to reveal that their promises were somewhat empty. Homeless people are, as ever, being kept from valuable resources that could save their lives, despite their logical availability.

With Coronavirus spreading rapidly, the government’s carelessness could become more lethal to this vulnerable section of society than ever before.

Rose Morley