The government says East Europeans may not claim the same benefits as other EU workers. In the final part of his series on the poverty line, Nick Davies meets destitute Poles in London and discovers a secret city.
Ryzard studied banking and finance in Warsaw. He has ended up in a bank in London, sleeping in its doorway. He speaks English, he has a gentle obsession with chess and the solution of chess problems. He came to London to work, to earn enough to finish his studies. He has ended up virtually destitute.
Last year, under pressure from right-wing newspapers, the Prime Minister agreed that although East Europeans could come to the UK and work and pay tax and national insurance like all other members of the European Union, they would not be allowed to claim the welfare benefits for which they were paying unless they had continuous employment for at least a year. In the meantime, they would live on a narrow edge where they could cling to work and survive – or they could fall without a safety net.
It is half past six in the morning. Ryzard rolls up his sleeping bag and sets off for a day of survival. He calls it ‘walking for food’, tramping miles across the city, in search of the soup kitchens where he can eat and of the hidden refuges where he can find the others who, like him, have fallen off the edge and tumbled back to the days of Dickensian London. A day with Ryzard is a journey through a secret city.
In amongst some trees in a small park by the river, we find Adam and Josef living together on an abandoned sofa. Adam was working until a few weeks ago when he was set upon by English youths who beat him up so badly that he qualified for NHS emergency treatment, and while he was hospitalised, he lost his job and, therefore, could no longer pay £50 a week for the bedroom he had been sharing with two other men in Acton. Josef is still working but he earns a pittance and sends almost all of it back to Poland, where he has six children to support.
We find Kristof, who has been living under the railway bridge on Galena Road in Hammersmith. He is aged 38, from Gliwice in southern Poland. He worked and paid his UK tax and national insurance for nine months before he was cut down by bladder cancer. NHS doctors told him they did not know whether they were allowed to operate on him since he had not clocked up a full year of continuous work. They delayed and then, despite the risk of trouble for themselves, they removed the tumour. But the four weeks in hospital cost him his job. He was too weak to work. He was still not entitled to claim any benefit. So he ended up under the railway bridge, with an infection in his operation wound, an infection in his kidney which was twisting him with pain, with no money at all and with a sheet of cardboard and some packing paper for a sick bed. He is very thin.
Under the trees on Brook Green, we find Alex, who was an anaesthetist in Lithuania, and who was doing well in London, with a job and a shared room until some Polish men got him drunk and stole everything – his cash, his mobile phone, his shoes and worst of all the paperwork which allowed him to work. So he fell. In a soup kitchen, we find a 50-year-old Polish welder called Stansilav whose home is a supermarket car park in Hammersmith; two Lithuanians who live under a buddleia bush behind a stone staircase in a small park nearby; and several men who live more or less permanently in one of the terminals at Heathrow Airport.
Ryzard walks and talks. Like the others, he is infuriated at the idea that they have come to London to claim benefits – as though they really would leave their friends and families and travel across Europe to claim Job Seekers Allowance worth £8 a day. Most of them are skilled. Some are highly educated. They have come to work, to send money home to protect their families from the raging unemployment which the free market has bestowed on their country. Some of them have succeeded. One of Ryzard’s friends is now running his own building company.
Ryzard, too, was doing well until about a month ago. He had been working for a decorating company, sub-contracting and earning good money. Suddenly, he started to feel depressed. He’s not sure why: he had a feeling of failure and he just couldn’t function any more. He started sleeping 12 or 13 hours a day and, when he was awake, all he wanted to do was to play chess in Internet cafes. He stopped showing up to supervise the two jobs he was running at the time; the men he had hired did terrible work; he had already laid out money on the jobs; but he didn’t get paid, and the decorating company refused to give him more work. Before he knew it, he was £3,000 in debt and with no source of income. You can’t make mistakes, if you have no safety net.
Within a few days, he had to leave the flat in north London, which he had been sharing with two other men. So, he found himself with ten pence in his pocket and nowhere to sleep. It was ten at night and it was cold. He walked for five hours and reached Victoria Station but it was closed. For two days he simply wandered, creeping into the emergency department of Charing Cross hospital to sleep until they threw him out, eating nothing.
On the third day, he had two pieces of luck. First, he met an entirely drunken man who told him about a church in Hammersmith which would give him food, and so he ate. Second, he trecked to the house of a friend in Neasden, north London, who lent him £100 which allowed him, among other things, to buy a one-week bus pass so that he could sleep on the night buses. Briefly, he stayed in a flat with a junky in Peckham, south London, but it was filthy and when the junky started threatening him for cash, he headed back to the streets where he simply walked for miles each day until, a week or so later, he had another piece of luck when he ran into a homeless Jamaican who saw the blisters on his feet and said he could sleep on the floor with him in a squat near Waterloo Station in central London.
Now, we reach that same squat. From the outside, the building appears to have died. The roof is sprouting weeds, the windows are boarded up, the doors are sealed, apart from one where a cardboard curtain hangs over the smashed glass which once filled its frame. Inside, it is a little worse. There is no electricity, although the cables hang down from the broken bowels of the ceilings. There is no water, although it bubbles down from somewhere upstairs. There are piles of rubble on the floor, busted binbags full of garbage piled up against the walls, a broken cooker, a broken toilet, a bucket full of old piss, graffiti on the walls and men sleeping on just about all the clear floorspace.
Most of them have mattresses, which Ryzard says they found in rubbish skips. Some of them lie under their coats, some under a single blanket. It seems there have been people sleeping here for many months. Ryzard says they found the building accidentally when two men were having a fight on the pavement and broke the glass in the door and then realised it was empty. “It looks like nobody lives here,” he says. “But we do.”
All of these men have been pushed over the edge. Most speak no English. As a result, many of them have been duped: illegally conned out of money by job agencies; put to work at wages way below the national minimum; hired for work and simply never paid. Some of them have been beaten by bureaucracy: they are told they cannot have a full-time job unless they have a bank account, and they cannot get a bank account unless they have a permanent address, but they cannot have a permanent address unless they have a full-time job to pay for a deposit and rent in advance.
The mere fact of being destitute makes it harder to find work. Most have no phones to arrange job interviews. Their clothes may be dirty, they will not have shaved. Ryzard recently picked up a job decorating a house, but simply could not carry on because he was so exhausted from sleeping rough. He had earned £200 and thought he could double it by buying a stolen lap-top computer from two men he had met on Wimbledon Park Station, then selling it for £400. He shared his plan with his friend from Neasden, who gave him £200 to buy him a lap-top too. As he left his friend’s house at around midnight, with £400 in cash in his pocket, a group of young men asked him for a cigarette and then grabbed him and started demanding money. He managed to get away, but things only got worse. He met up with the men with the stolen computers, who sat in their car and showed him a beautiful lap-top still in its box. He handed over £200, they handed over the box and it was only after they had driven off that he discovered that they had swapped the boxes and given him one that contained only three bottles of Evian. He returned £200 to his friend and was penniless again.
Unlike most of these men, Ryzard has clocked up enough work to qualify for benefit. He first came here several years before Poland joined the EU and he has the paperwork to prove he has paid UK tax and national insurance for four years. When he became homeless, he went to claim Job Seekers Allowance and was told it would take at least five weeks to process his claim. Four months later, they declared he was entitled to nothing. They gave no explanation.
* Some names have been changed.
