We all do it. After a night out in town in Canterbury, we walk pass the many homeless people and ignore their cries for salvation. But surely a little of our change can’t really make a difference? This is a problem the government and local services should be dealing with, right?

As we are now in the middle of the winter periods that sends chills through the air, this is a time more than any we should be concerning ourselves with the homeless, poverty stricken in Canterbury.
Over the last few years, the number of homeless people in Canterbury has rapidly increased, many homeless people venturing into Canterbury from neighbouring cities and towns lacking in sufficient services to deal with the homelessness problem. No doubt they seek some solace in a town steeped in religious history with its huge place of worship- the Cathedral, hoping to transcend their lot with the help and guidance they need.

So where is the government in all of this? Well, every year the government records the amount of homeless people in cities like Canterbury by sending officials to them. Last year, the government recorded that there were only two homeless people in the whole of Canterbury! This statistic has an air of the ridiculous about it considering a local homeless charity, the Scrine Foundation, has an average of twenty homeless people a night in their homeless shelter. Apparently, the government doesn’t count homeless people living behind shops and near or on railway lines, that are in emergency homeless shelters, as well as people that it claims are not ‘bedded down’ correctly.

If local charities complain about this, the government will allow them to go ahead with their own count. However, the devilish snag here is that if charities are genuine in recording vast amounts of homelessness people, in other words the truth, the government claims they’re not doing their jobs properly and can cut their funding. The detrimental and absurd effect this has then is that local charities and services that tell the truth about their huge homeless problem have their funding cut and struggle even more to deal with the enormousness of their situation. On the contrary, places in which charities and aid services fabricate a low homeless figure will be provided with the increased funding.

The consequence of this topsy-turvy situation is the spread of homeless people into Canterbury, as other small towns and cities in the areas around us struggle to develop the local services they need to cope with the problem. This has put charities like the Scrine foundation under a great deal of pressure, and the Local Authority hasn’t done them any favours, refusing to provide them with a nurse they desperately need to replace a retired one.

So, what can we do as University students? Well, we’ve all seen the lives homeless people in Canterbury live. Many of them are fed up of the government, such as some homeless people you may have seen holding up a cardboard sign with ‘Gordon Brown sucks’ scrawled on it. It might be forgivable to think that this is none of our concern; many of us don’t even live here permanently. But it seems to me that the government’s attitude to the problem is far worse, they seem to have actively ignored, tried to brush under the carpet and have underestimated the scope of the problem.
We as university students, more than anyone, need to take active steps to help the community around us. Canterbury is a university city, and if we all put the effort in to help charities like the Scrine foundation, that magnanimously continue to help the homeless , through for example fundraising, there is no limit to what we have achieve.

However, at the moment many the homeless people in Canterbury suffer from mental illness, and have trouble making sense of the harsh reality of the world around them. At the moment, it seems, even in this most holly of cities, salvation is still a long way off for many of these people.