London Evening Standard/London

 

 

For the last two months, father-of-three Pirthy Sandhu has been sleeping rough on the Havelock Estate in Southall, and at 10pm every night, he climbs through a hole in a wall below a sign that says “please put your rubbish into the chute” and slips down the chute into a giant wheelie bin full of garbage.

He hauls himself out, rummages for his sleeping-bag hidden in the corner, spreads it out on the dank, concrete floor between the bins and, despite the overpowering stench, tries to grab a few hours sleep.

But within minutes Sandhu, 39, is interrupted as a second man, Gurpreet Singh, 23, arrives down the chute and clatters into the tomb-like basement. He, too, has recently become jobless and homeless and arranges his sleeping bag alongside Sandhu’s.

By midnight, 10 young men in their twenties and thirties - including seven Sikhs, two Muslims and one white - have bedded down in the pungent bin room.

“We get massive rats crawling over us at night and sometimes foxes jump into the bins and we have to chase them out,” says Sandhu, an unskilled labourer who came to London from the Punjab 16 years ago. “The place is disgusting but we have nowhere else to go and on freezing nights it’s a roof over our heads to keep us dry before the caretaker throws us out at 6am.”

Locals call them “the bin men of Southall” and more than 50 of them occupy half a dozen of these appalling, rat-infested bin-rooms on the sprawling 21-hectare Havelock Estate - just a short walk from the Southall Gurdwara, the temple where they get three free meals a day.

There are rough sleepers bedding down in similarly horrendous conditions under the M4 overpass at Heston Bridge on the border of Southall and Hounslow.

Figures published by the Standard last month showed that London’s rough sleepers have soared by almost a quarter, from 3,017 in 2007-08 to 3,673 in 2009-10.

In Southall, known as “Little India” because two-thirds of its 70,000 population are south Asian and home to the largest Sikh population in London, three rough sleepers died this winter, unable to survive the coldest December since 1981.

But the death rate would have been substantially higher, say locals, if not for a £2,000 grant provided by the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund to a small but passionate new charity, the Sikh Welfare Awareness Team (SWAT), which supplied 100 rough sleepers in Southall with warm jackets and sleeping bags.

“Two years ago, you would never find anyone sleeping rough round here, but now over 150 homeless people including women sleep rough in the Southall Ealing area,” says Randeep Lall, 39, a co-founder of SWAT.

“We have eight volunteers who go out every night to help the homeless, and the people we see sleep in dustbins, cemeteries, disused garages, under bridges and residential alleyways. One man leaves the temple when it closes at 11pm and goes into a phone box until the temple re-opens at 3am. It’s not just Sikhs we help either.”

According to Lall, the local politicians have turned a blind eye to the problem, including Labour MP for Ealing Southall, Virendra Sharma. “We recently invited Sharma to visit our new youth club which offers a Wednesday night boxing club and a Friday night programme to combat drug use among teenagers, and while he was there I asked for his help in tackling the growing homeless problem on our doorstep. I couldn’t believe his response. He turned to me and said: ‘I have no compassion for these people. Their situation is totally self-inflicted. I’m happy to say that publicly on camera?.”

The Standard tried to reach Sharma to ask him what he meant by “self-inflicted”, but he was out of the country attending his father’s funeral.