Abstract
AbstractThis article utilizes an organizational history of the Birmingham-based Handsworth Single Homeless Action Group (HSHAG) to explore black youth homelessness and inner-city policy in 1980s Britain. It draws upon under-used charity archives to intervene in recent debates, considering the part played by the voluntary sector within the Thatcher administrations’ inner-city policies and what targeted funding of this kind reveals about the remaking of the welfare state in these years. First, it introduces HSHAG, setting out the context of inner-city funding programmes, before questioning how sustainable this might have been for voluntary organizations engaged in supporting the homeless population. Secondly, it examines the effects of housing privatization and unemployment on HSHAG's attempts to advise homeless black individuals and assert their rights as citizens to state support. Together, it exposes the role of the voluntary sector in welfare state restructuring and considers how this change made the task of homelessness organizations Herculean.
Highlights
At the conclusion of the 1983 Central Television documentary Homeless in Handsworth, housing worker Dave Butchere described the despair of homeless clients who could not be helped, recounting that they would ‘sit there, sometimes for hours, and cry’.1 Butchere worked for the Handsworth Single Homeless Action Group (HSHAG), an advocacy organization operating in the black innercity area of Handsworth in Birmingham, primarily within the African-Caribbean community
This article utilizes an organizational history of the Birmingham-based Handsworth Single Homeless Action Group (HSHAG) to explore black youth homelessness and inner-city policy in 1980s Britain
It draws upon under-used charity archives to intervene in recent debates, considering the part played by the voluntary sector within the Thatcher administrations’ inner-city policies and what targeted funding of this kind reveals about the remaking of the welfare state in these years
Summary
At the conclusion of the 1983 Central Television documentary Homeless in Handsworth, housing worker Dave Butchere described the despair of homeless clients who could not be helped, recounting that they would ‘sit there, sometimes for hours, and cry’.1 Butchere worked for the Handsworth Single Homeless Action Group (HSHAG), an advocacy organization operating in the black innercity area of Handsworth in Birmingham, primarily within the African-Caribbean community. Reviewing their first three years of operation in 1982, the Birmingham Inner City Partnership noted that £670,000 had been granted to voluntary organizations to ‘[meet] personal social needs’ as well as undertake ‘general community work’.36 This was a ‘very general, loose and trust-dependent grants regime’ without the strategic oversight that would become a condition of state funding in the late 1990s.37. The case of HSHAG illustrates that the inner-city funding did little to solidify the ability of the voluntary sector to either ‘[meet] personal social needs’ or undertake ‘general community work’ These constraints can be seen in the constant petitioning of Barrow Cadbury for small grants. Colin Rochester has suggested that by the New Labour era the voluntary sector was ‘no longer seen as valuable in its own right, but as useful to government as a means to achieving its own ends’.55 The 1980s seems, to have represented a time in which central government saw the voluntary sector as ‘a means to achieving its own ends’, but lacked any co-ordinated sense of how it might do so
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