Re your article on homeless refugees in Liverpool (‘We’re going to see people dying on the streets’: homeless refugee crisis grips Liverpool, 21 November), this crisis has arrived in Norwich. I’ve worked in homelessness for 26 years and I’ve never known it like this. The past few weeks where I work – at a long-established charity for young people – have been some of the most harrowing of my working life. In the recent cold snap, it was through pure perseverance, persuasion, graft and last-minute luck that no refugees froze to death. One young man described his fear at 4am, under the bridge where he was sleeping, when it started snowing; how he had chest pains and felt his body lock up. I am so angry and heartbroken at the callousness being shown not just by the government, which has created this hostile environment so ruthlessly, but the local authorities who are bowing to it.
It is so hard to look these young men in the eye and tell them that there is nothing more we can do apart from, maybe, open a tin of soup for them to heat up in the microwave, or on one occasion last week, buy a pair of boots for someone because his feet were so cold in his trainers and he was going to be sleeping out.
