People passed from pillar to post

The worst social problems are always those no one wants the headache of dealing with. They get shunted from department to department, from one compartmentalised public service to another, with no one willing or able to carry the risk or pick up the tab.

Homelessness is one such problem. Our front-page splash this month highlights what on the face of it seems like a case of this kind of
demand shunting.

To summarise, a Hackney mother with nowhere to live was left high and dry even after she obtained an eviction notice proving she was homeless and produced this to council staff. Legal duties towards her should then have kicked in, but she was instead told to go away and come back again in a fortnight.

That would be bad enough, but the woman had her four children with her, the youngest of whom was a baby – something that should have prompted emergency calls to social workers.

Instead, this down on their luck family of five were removed from Hackney Service Centre and deposited on the pavement outside. Only after a good samaritan intervened did the council finally help.

It is embarrassing that this happened just weeks after the council co-published a No First Night Out report highlighting the importance of early intervention in cases like the one described here.

This newspaper is aware of a similar case in another part of London involving a homeless, heavily pregnant woman locked out of temporary accommodation by council workers just two days before her due date.

The police – onto whom a lot of these kinds of cases are unfairly dumped – eventually got involved and put her up for the night.

These are just the cases we know about. There must surely be many others.

Council resources are stretched like never before, and no one can envy the challenge this poses. But this is exacerbated by a “not my problem” mentality that pervades all of our society. People turn a blind eye and expect someone else to deal with the problem – but often it is just left to grow worse.