Monarchist, I ain’t. Pragmatist, I am. So if Prince William wants to have a crack at ending homelessness via a new initiative called Homewards and pilot it in six test regions, I say – have at it, and good luck to you. But if you’re going to publicise it with a two-part documentary on ITV I’m afraid I am professionally bound to judge you on your degree of involvement and understanding of the project, alongside your telegenic articulacy and charm, and put aside the predisposition of fondness towards you that I feel for anybody I am old enough to remember being born. (You were so cute! I was eight! It was so exciting! Your picture went in my Diana, Princess of Wales scrapbook that I have since looked upon many times in utter bafflement that she and I were ever so young or foolish.)
Anyway. The heir to the throne scores pretty high in all categories. Were it not for the fact that I am still not entirely clear quite how Homewards is going to achieve its goal of making homelessness “rare, brief and unrepeated”, it would be higher. I know it involves flagship locations, £500,000 from the Royal Foundation for each of them over five years, unlocking scalable solutions, asking communities, tailoring solutions (before or after scaling them I am not sure), reaching out, working from the bottom up, bringing people together, shining a light, putting aside failed thinking, building coalitions, replicating successes – but what this all adds up to I do not know.
He seems to understand the fundamental issues and talk to charity workers and their clients on their own terms. And if he’s happier talking to the latter than actually serving them dinner or collecting their dirty plates as requested by Claudette Dawkins, who runs the canteen where he is filmed – well, I guess there’s only so much you can realistically expect from a king-in-waiting. And he is visibly, as the CEO of London homeless shelter the Passage attests, “very good at putting people at their ease”.
The programme is a mixture of interviews with the prince – softball questions from an unseen interlocutor, in a discreetly beautiful room you suspect is the most modest they could find among, ahem, all his properties – real life stories from people still on or newly off the streets, and meetings with phenomena like Safiya Saeed, founder of the Reach Up youth group in Sheffield, to whom an entire series should be devoted. We meet her giving a pep talk to her shuffling, grinning teenagers before the prince arrives. “Utmost respect!” she says, grinning back but adding a gimlet eye. “Utmost behaviour! But don’t be boring. Be you but don’t be you-you, OK?” The affection between her and her charges is almost palpable.
Later she visits a fellow Muslim woman Yusia, who has five children and three jobs and whose landlord is trying to evict them all under a no-fault notice (now outlawed by the new government). They talk in Yusia’s native language as Safiya tries to mitigate the disaster that threatens. When asked about the criticism surrounding the prince’s privilege, her take is robust. “We don’t care where he lives. The important thing is he’s leading something. If he doesn’t, who will? Let’s just start.”
In London, the equally charismatic and no-nonsense Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, who, at 15, was sleeping on the streets to escape a home life that was worse than having no home at all and is now chief fire officer for West Sussex fire and rescue service, is investigating possible templates that could be used by Homewards. One is Housing First, itself imported from Finland, which sets people up in homes then provides them with bespoke support until they can truly live independently. As one person says: “It’s not rocket science.” Nor, as another notes, is it expensive when you factor in all the health and other problems you are helping people avoid.
Prince William seems to grasp the complexity of homelessness and be keen to dismantle people’s assumptions and judgments. Best of all he seems, from the glimpses we get of them, to be surrounding himself with good, experienced people and not be intimidated by them or their greater knowledge. So let’s let him just start. The question of who will if he doesn’t, though, should occupy us still.
• Prince William: We Can End Homelessness aired on ITV1
