Begging the question: Will ban solve social ills?

ABERDEEN council’s bid to ban begging faces stiff opposition from charity workers and lawyers, write Dani Garavelli and Will Lyon

TONY Roberts is sitting in the doorway of a vacant shop in Aberdeen’s Union Street, his black Labrador Brett at his side and his few possessions crammed into a plastic bag. A former soldier who served in the Falklands, he has been begging in the city for 25 years. A bullet to his leg left him suffering from deep vein thrombosis and unable to work. Aged just 53, his face is scabbed and his beard matted, but he chortles as he reminisces about his time in the army and he tucks in gratefully to a steak bake bought by a passer-by.

For Tony, who sleeps rough, setting out his cap for strangers has become a way of life, the only means he has of ­surviving from day to day. But if a proposed new bylaw banning begging gets the ­go-ahead, he faces the prospect of going to jail.

Aberdeen City Council’s Labour-led coalition has announced the move in ­response, it says, to calls from the public fed up of having to run the gauntlet of panhandlers, and in the hopes of breathing fresh life into a high street which, despite Aberdeen’s comparative affluence, looks increasingly run-down.

City leaders worry that the increasing number of beggars concentrated in a relatively small space is affecting both tourism and trade, with shoppers put off by constant requests for cash. “There is no excuse for begging in this day and age. It’s Dickensian,” says Willie Young, the council’s convener for finances and resources, who is driving the proposal. “If the bylaw was passed we would work with the criminal justice system to make sure measures were put in place to help those beggars who were genuinely homeless, genuinely in need. But those who weren’t – professional beggars if you like – would be dealt with quite ­differently.”

This is not the first time a Scottish city has sought powers to tackle the blight of begging, which poses a dilemma for civic leaders the world over. Previous ­attempts by Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen to introduce bylaws have all been stymied by the Scottish Government, which believes existing laws are tough enough to deal with aggressive begging and that it would be wrong to criminalise non-aggressive begging.

In the wake of one previous attempt, Aberdeen City Council introduced “begging boxes” to allow those who wanted to help to give directly to a homeless charity, but it did little to ease the ­problem.

Fuelling the desire for a bylaw this time round is a survey which suggests just one in four of those begging on ­Union Street is homeless and a belief that the city is being targeted by professional beggars from eastern Europe who approach ­people for money because begging is ­entrenched in their culture or because they are working as part of a gang.

There is some anecdotal evidence of this. On the day we visited, only two of the seven beggars on Union Street were English-speaking. And locals talk of vans offloading people in the morning and picking them up at night. “They arrive [early], rotate places during the day and gather all their funds to the leader at night,” claims Robert Hargreaves, 67, who, though not homeless, says he needs to beg to heat his flat.

Although little research has been carried out into the scale of the problem, area commander for Glasgow city centre Chief Inspector Alan Porte last month warned Christmas shoppers that organised gangs – and those they exploit –were now vying with the truly destitute.

Aberdeen’s Labour-led coalition also insists that the Scottish Government’s new homelessness legislation, which entitles anyone made homeless through no fault of their own (not just those with families or complex needs) to settled accommodation, means there is no longer any justification for begging. Yet its solution, to make it a criminal offence punishable with a fine or a jail sentence, has been met with dismay by those who believe our prison system is already swamped and that beggars, whatever their circumstances, deserve support rather than sanctions.

“Begging is a blight on our communities and we should not overlook the criminal intent of those who seek to exploit vulnerable people by sending them out to beg,” says Gordon MacRae, head of communications and policy at Shelter Scotland. “But those who are forced to beg on our streets need support and ­assistance. Rarely does criminalising a social problem provide communities with the effective solution they need.”

Big Issue editor Paul McNamee fears criminalisation will push the already vulnerable further into the margins and reinforce the Victorian idea of the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, while Mike Dailly, principal solicitor at Govan Law Centre, says that far from allowing the authorities to target specific need, the bylaw will shift resources away from frontline services. “If you make begging a criminal offence, that means people get fined and if they can’t pay their fine they will end up doing a fixed term of 60 days. Where is the logic in the taxpayer paying thousands of pounds on the criminal justice system to criminalise begging when that money should be spent on helping people?”

Dailly dismisses the idea that only “professional” beggars would be punished were the bylaw to be passed. “You can’t create a system that’s as sophisticated as that,” he says. “If you make something a criminal offence, it’s a criminal offence for everyone.”

Still, no-one is suggesting begging is a positive force, either for those who do it or for society at large. So what can realistically be done to eradicate it? And with so much emphasis on the supposed flood of professional beggars from ­Romania and other parts of Eastern ­Europe, why isn’t more being done to determine the exact scale and nature of the problem?

The reason few cities have initiated successful crackdowns is, as the US has already discovered, that blanket bans may breach human rights. According to a report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty which looked at 180 US cities, there was a 7 per cent increase in prohibitions on begging ­between 2009 and 2011.

But many of them were overturned in court. Last year, Steve Ray Evans successfully challenged citations for begging near roads in several Utah cities on the grounds they violated his right to freedom of expression under the First Amendment, while a federal judge ruled that Michigan’s blanket ban on begging was unlawful after a homeless man and a war veteran sued on the same basis.

The chances are that, in the unlikely event of Aberdeen City Council’s bylaw gaining Scottish Government approval, it would be challenged as a breach of articles eight, 10 and/or 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to a private life, freedom of expression and freedom of association, respectively).

But even if such a law were introduced, wouldn’t forcibly moving people on simply displace the activity or push those with habits further into crime?

Claire Gibson has more insight than most into begging. As the chief executive of Edinburgh-based charity Streetwork, she spends most of her time trying to help people whose lives are so fractured they find it impossible to hold down a job or any kind of stable relationship. Unsurprisingly, she believes the best way to wipe out begging is to support those involved through the often painful and protracted process of reintegrating into society.

“We don’t underestimate the impact begging has on communities,” she says. “But I feel that criminalising it, like criminalising prostitution, would just change the nature of the activity – drive it underground.”

Like many of those who work with those on the street, Gibson points out that not all rough sleepers are beggars and vice versa. But even where they are one and the same, she says, it is naive to think the government’s new homelessness legislation is going to act as a panacea. While applauding it as “aspirational”, she points out that many of the people Streetwork helps were already classed as priority cases – and were still on the street.

“What you have to understand is that when you are on drugs, getting money for your next fix is your top priority. Many people on the street will be focused on making enough money to buy a bag of heroin – and they will miss the 2pm appointment they needed to attend in order to secure a roof over their head for the night. Even when they are offered accommodation, their behaviour may be challenging or it may be inappropriate for their needs and they may find themselves caught up in a cycle of homelessness.”

Gibson also has first-hand experience of the influx of “foreign” beggars, who are the source of so much of the current unease. She says that around 20 per cent of the 1,300 people the charity’s crisis service helps each year come from ­Europe – mostly Poland, but also Spain and Italy. “These are people who are ­destitute – many of them are skilled people who came to this country when times were good then lost their jobs and fell into a spiral of drinking and street living,” she says.

She admits, however, that Streetwork has been unable to make any headway with a small number of Romanian ­women who beg on the streets of Edinburgh.

“We have employed multilingual staff and had our leaflets printed in ­Romanian, but we haven’t been able to get them to engage with us at all,” she says. “We can see they are vulnerable and in need and we can only speculate on the reasons they do not wish to get involved with us.”

Dailly too is aware of issues surrounding eastern Europeans (particularly Roma). Through the Govan Law Centre, he has encountered incidents of bonded labour, where immigrants have paid money to come to Scotland for a new life, then discover they’re required to work in a job which pays less than the minimum wage.

But he believes that using eastern ­European beggars as an excuse for ­criminalising the activity is an exercise in scapegoating. “People who have been stigmatised as an ethnic group – whether it’s in Romania or the Slovak Republic or Poland – come to Scotland to conditions which you and I might think are appalling, but compared with the treatment they experienced where they came from it’s not as bad,” he says. “You’re talking about people who are just trying to survive.”

Back in Aberdeen, Tony Roberts says the new bylaw would have a devastating impact. “If these plans go ahead I guess I’ll be going to prison as it’s either that or I starve to death.”

The Labour-led coalition may insist it is responding to calls from the local community, but, even in Aberdeen, opinion is split. “I’m keen for this to happen,” Steven Beresford says in an online post. “I pass a ‘homeless’ man nearly every day on Back Wynd who asks me for money. On different occasions, I’ve seen him with a mountain bike, a BMX, an iPod, a digital camera and a touch screen mobile phone.”

But Bob Walker, 74, who has shopped on Union Street all his life, wants the politicians to back down. “Apart from the foreign beggars, I see the same local faces year after year and I don’t understand why they aren’t being helped,” he says. “They are there for a reason and the authorities should look to fix the problem of people becoming beggars rather than punishing them for it.”

Though the sight of beggars on the streets makes people feel uncomfortable – and many are keen to see existing laws used to crack down on aggressive or ­organised begging – few seem enthusiastic about the outlawing of an activity which is, as Claire Gibson puts it, a declaration of unmet needs.

Dailly adds: “I think people ought to have some compassion and understand that the person they are tripping over could have been a teacher or somebody who worked and brought up a family and contributed to society and then it all went pear-shaped. Some of these people have been through unimaginable ­ordeals. There’s a huge story behind every single case.” «