Home: The Key to Hope / Cartref: Yr Allwedd i Obaith

I attended the inspirational opening of this amazing Crisis exhibition, curated by South Wales Skylight and Sponsored by Julie James (the former cabinet secretary for housing, now the Leader of the House), about the idea of home for people experiencing homeless, expressed through photography, textiles, and art.  The exhibition is at the Senedd building and I recommend that you go and see it, if you have the time.  There were speeches today given by Debbie Thomas, the fab head of policy and comms at Crisis, Ashella Lewis from Skylight, and Jayne Bryant, the Cabinet Secretary for Housing and Local Government.  I realised I hadn’t heard Jane Bryant do a speech before, but this was an impressive and warm performance and I left convinced that 2025 is likely to see new homelessness legislation (to which I will turn briefly below).  However, the star of the show was Archie, one of the exhibition’s co-curators, who spoke so beautifully about how the experience of homelessness had affected him, and how the hardest part had been how those accumulated experiences had affected him in its “quiet aftermath”; how homelessness had been a matter of struggle, survival, and hope; and how he hoped that the exhibition might educate us. (Just a note here to say that, unfortunately, I had to leave the launch early, and missed the talk given by Declan, who goes by the artist name D’Captured, which I’m told was really powerful too).

I have spent some time engaging with (and contributing to) the voluminous, complex, contradictory academic literature about “home”, and more recent research has demonstrated how photo-elicitation as a method can bring new dimensions to our understanding (see, for example, McCarthy, 2020;  Soaita & McKee, 2021; Stout & Collins, 2024 – full references can be found at the end of this post if you would like to follow them up) by focusing on the self-articulation of individuals of their own experiences in the making and unmaking of home/lessness.  At some point, there is a project to be done about homeless people’s possessions (there is great work in Canada: Blomley, Flynn & Sylvestre, 2020) following on the work of Helen Carr (2017) (and others) on companions.

However, it was utterly humbling to experience this exhibition, hear Archie, read the stories, and appreciate the photographs as well as the range of artistic representations.  The stories about pet companions, told from the perspective of the pet, artworks and photography about pets, and making the important point that homelessness can involve a traumatic separation from the companion has given me new insights into the complex experiences of homelessness.  I was struck by this comment, that “For many of us who have pets, they are our lifeline, companion and confidant throughout the toughest time in our lives”.  Another story which really struck me was that of Wendy, who explained her “homeless journey 0-10 months”.  As researchers, we commonly get a snapshot of a moment in time, perhaps because our interest lies in a (usually bureaucratic) moment or decision-making process, and we don’t have the opportunity for that kind of work which would give us perhaps greater insight.  Wendy provided a photograph of an anonymous road crossing, but this seemed to represent those moments when she was unable to be in her TA, or searching for somewhere to live.

And, this takes me on to what I hope will be the year in which the new homelessness Bill will be presented.  For too long, our administrative-legal approach to homelessness has focused on individual failings and required those individuals to demonstrate their vulnerability in order to be accepted, rather than understand homelessness as a structural problem of the housing system/s.  The work done by the Welsh Government has been really tremendous, I think, in the Housing (Wales) Act 2014.  And, although I have questions (quite a lot, to which I might return in a subsequent post), it is notable that there appear to be far, far fewer challenges to local authority decision-making in homelessness cases than in England.  I think – and I think this without much evidence beyond anecdote – that this may be because there is a more collaborative approach in Wales between advisors and local authorities.  There will be other reasons as well and I am not going to suggest that the quality of decision-making in Wales is superior (it may be, of course, but, for my part, I doubt it in the nicest possible way – nobody goes in to housing to do harm).

The White Paper on Ending Homelessness in Wales was generated from work done by an outstanding expert group (eg in July 2020) and, as Jane Bryant explained today, hearing the voices of 350 people who had experienced homelessness.  Although that Consultation ended in January 2024, with an analysis of the responses published in April 2024, alongside work done by the Welsh Refugee Council (refugee experiences) and TPAS Cymru (about allocations), we have so far only had the high-level action plan on ending homelessness.

But, I am really excited to see how this policy work is translated by legislative counsel into a Bill which will enact the structural and discursive changes which are required in the way in which we think about homelessness in Wales.  I think we should listen to, and be guided by, Archie, Wendy and colleagues; and less by lawyers seeking to pin holes in things.  One of the points made in the exhibition, which chimes with my own (and others’) research, is about time and the fact that homeless people have to wait on others’ schedules/time, leading to interminable waiting and the disempowering effects of waiting on others to answer the questions.  This description in the exhibition of that temporal process experience really left me:

Experiencing homelessness can feel like endless waiting.

You wait and wait in a queue, searching for answers to questions about your future.  Searching for a home.

But you don’t know when you will reach the front of the line and what door will open when you get there.

Experiencing homelessness can feel long and uncertain.

I hope that those drafting the Bill will bear in mind that disempowering practice and the importance of time.

References (do get in touch if you can’t access these and would like to read them)

Blomley, N., Flynn, A. and Sylvestre, M-E, (2020), “Governing the Belongings of the Precariously Housed: A Critical Legal Geography”, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 16: 165-81.

Carr, H. (2017), “Caring at the Borders of the Human: Companion animals and the homeless”, in Rosie Harding, Ruth Fletch, Chris Beasley (eds), Revaluing Care in Theory, Law and Policy, London: Routledge

McCarthy, L. (2020), “Homeless women, material objects and home (un)making”, Housing Studies, 35(7) 1309-31

Soaita, A. and McKee, K. (2021), “Researching Home’s Tangible and Intangible Materialities by Photo-Elicitation”, Housing, Theory and Society, 38(3) 279-99

Stout, A. and Collins, D. (2024), “Picturing a Home: A New Perspective on Home-Making Through Photo-Elicitation”, Housing, Theory and Society, 41(3): 360-78