Forum - Westminster’s plan to ban free food distribution will criminalise the poor, argues 'Gandhi: Naked Ambition' author Jad Adams

Published: 18 March 2011

THE proposal by Westminster Council to punish the poor and those who set out to help them is beyond satire. They want to introduce a bylaw making it a criminal offence punishable by a fine of £500 to distribute free food or to sleep out.

‘You, you with the sandwich! You’re nicked, get in the van.’

Westminster’s plan amounts to an intention to criminalise the poor and those who would help them. It is absurd, it is immoral and it won’t work.

I have volunteered with Nightwatch, a charity that cares for homeless people, for more than 30 years. 

I know the clients and I know the volunteers. I can tell Westminster exactly what will happen if their mean-spirited proposal is passed into law.  

It won’t work because decent people will step forward to defy it. The introduction of this bylaw will have the exactly opposite effect from what Westminster intends. People from the surrounding areas and further afield will descend on Westminster every night and politely and without aggression defy the ban by giving food to the poor. 

The effect will be an increase in the distribution of food.

Westminster says the homeless should not be out at all but should be ‘accessing building-based services’. But no one becomes homeless because of the offer of a cup of soup and a sandwich. These are not people for whom ‘building-based services’ have worked in the past.

Most are people whom the system has failed, or by their own behaviour or circumstances have put themselves outside it.  They can be helped, but they need to be helped at their own pace. It is, anyway, untrue that Westminster has enough indoor places for homeless people. There is no open-access hostel that you can walk in and have a bed for the night if the alternative is sleeping on the streets.

Westminster has many fine locations that attract tourists, shoppers, politicians, office workers and others from all over the world.  

Westminster probably has more rich people than any area of comparable size in the country. It also has many poor people. If Westminster were not so wealthy, the poor would not be attracted there in such numbers. There are disagreements as to exactly what should be done about the disparity of wealth, but the answer to the question of poverty cannot be ‘class cleansing’ of sweeping the poor off the streets in one particular area.

Westminster’s civic leaders should be advised to turn their sharp minds to the question of exactly what kind of people volunteer to go out at night in conditions that are unglamorous and sometimes even unsafe, to care for the poor.

The people who distribute food to the poor are by definition well motivated, by  profoundly held convictions. Many are professional people, I know teachers, doctors and engineers who volunteer in this way.

Many volunteers are Christians who were brought up on tales of martyrdom for the faith; the central image of the religion is of sacrifice for the sake of humanity.  Their ritual of worship incorporates symbolic feeding in the mass. For them, the distribution of food to the poor is a moral obligation, it is a scriptural injunction and follows the behaviour of their founder, who is recorded in all four gospels to have fed people in their thousands (now, Jesus is a person who wouldn’t have been popular with Westminster Council).

These are not people who would be deterred from a righteous act by the threat of punishment.  The reverse is more probably the case.

I have never felt the need to go to Westminster to distribute food (my charity is busy enough in our own borough). The only thing that would compel me to go to Westminster to distribute food is if Westminster succeeds in making it illegal. I would then consider it a civic duty to defy an unjust law, and I would bring friends. 

• Jad Adams’ Gandhi: Naked Ambition is published next month in paperback by Quercus.