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With homelessness on the rise, youth homeless charity Centrepoint boss Seyi Obakin spoke to the Mirror a decade-and-a-half on from the night in London – and offered his verdict on how to tackle the issue
Fifteen years ago the future king bedded down for a night on the street to highlight the plight of those with no roof over their heads.
Now the youth homeless charity chief who joined Prince William shares the inside story – and offers his verdict on how to tackle the issue. With homelessness on the rise, Centrepoint CEO Seyi Obakin spoke to the Mirror a decade-and-a-half on this month from the night in London.
In 2009, the charity – which campaigns to end youth homelessness – marked its 40th anniversary. Mr Obakin recalled how patron Prince William was up for spending a night on the streets – so long as the charity boss joined him. “If I’m honest, I didn’t expect him to do exactly what he did,” Mr Obakin revealed. “At the time, Centrepoint had just started to get people to sleep out as a way of fundraising,” he said.
“So we just started to organise sleep out events. It wasn’t a lot of people but it was safe and secure for those people. It had to be cold and they had to sleep on the floor… it would be in a safe area where people wouldn’t be attacked.” Mr Obakin thought that might be what the then young Royal, now 42, might opt for – but what happened was rather different.
The CEO explained: “What he said was, ‘look… actually, if I’m going to do it, I want it to be authentic, I want to have as close…[to] what the experience of a young person who is homeless would have…’” Beforehand, the night was a guarded secret. “The only people who knew this was going to happen was me, him, his private secretary at the time and his PPO at the time,” Mr Obakin explained. “Only four of us knew, nobody else.”
The charity boss went out looking for potential spots to sleep rough before meeting the prince at Clarence House. “In fact, the place where we ended up was not one of the places I had in mind,” he said. They stayed near Blackfriars bridge, in the capital. For a long part of the night we tried to [sleep], but we couldn’t… It is surprising how noisy the city can be in the middle of the night… I think we probably drifted a bit here and there.”
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The pair were joined by William’s then private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkterton. A grainy photo released at the time showed the Royal – wearing a hoodie, jeans and hat – standing next to Mr Obakin. In the morning, they walked to a Centrepoint hostel in Soho. “Nobody recognised him because of the way we were dressed,” he explained. “We were dressed like a homeless person and we’ve just got up from sleeping rough.”
He added: “It tells me exactly what happens for a lot of homeless people and rough sleepers. People avoid them. People see them and cross the roads. People sometimes are scared of them. There’s a stereotype that comes with homelessness and homeless people that means that a lot of people don’t want to engage with them.”
Asked how he sees the issue of homelessness today compared to then, Mr Obakin said: “I think it’s a very sad story… you would think that we should have made a lot more progress than we have. But even if you just look at rough sleeping as an index, I would say today the number of people who are rough sleeping is more than double what it was in 2010. That’s going backwards, that’s not progress.”
On what needs to happen, he said: “I think we have to hold local authorities better to account for their responsibilities to young people at risk of homelessness. The other day I was chatting with some of my colleagues and it turns out that if you are a young person at risk of homelessness in London today, it is quite unlikely that you will find any local authority that is going to respond to you if you are not a care leaver and you’re not an unaccompanied asylum seeker. That’s a terrible indictment of where we are.” He added: “But holding local authorities more to account is just rhetoric if they don’t have the resources to do it. It’s not as though local authorities want to turn people away.”
The charity boss also said families needed earlier support “before things get going to where there are fractures that lead to homelessness issues”. He also advocates what he calls “stepping stone accommodation”, explaining: “How do you move people… from being homeless to being independent so they don’t become homeless again? Now if you move them straight away into a place to live in without giving them any kind of support and skills… they won’t be independent for very long.
“So one of the things that we are doing – which we want the government to take notice of – is we are piloting what we’re describing as stepping stone homes.” He added: “The thing that marks these homes out is that you ask people to pay a living rent. Not a market rent, a living rent. So the rent they pay in those homes is one third of their income… Whatever your income is, you’re paying rent that is related to that income.”
