St Mungo’s staff are now in their 11th week on the picket line

SHOCKING conditions in hostels for the homeless are taking a heavy toll on the mental health of tenants and charity workers, a whistleblower warned this week.

The floating support and outreach worker, who cannot be named for contractual reasons, works with vulnerable people at hostels including the “flagship” in Endell Street in Covent Garden.

She spoke about the “second-hand trauma” homeless front-line workers face as she joined colleagues in an unprecedented 11th week of industrial action against the charity St Mungo’s. The union Unite has called out its members who are demanding better pay and an end to threadbare resources they say are stretching workers to breaking point.

The woman said she had agreed to go on strike because of the problems. The service, she felt, had led to “unfair and disrespectful treatment of clients”, and she added: “Honestly, the state of the buildings is scary. You have mice everywhere. I have clients who tell me that they smoke crack to sleep because they can hear mice through the walls.

“In one of the most important, most iconic, hostels for St Mungo’s we had a leak over reception for about two months.”

The woman said hostel managers were told by the head office that there was not enough money to do repairs and things would only be fixed if they were “life threatening”. She said: “All of us experience a lot of second-hand trauma. We listen to things that are like a horror movie. You see clients going through these horrible situations and a lot of times I’ve gone home in the evening thinking ‘I really hope this person is still alive tomorrow’.”

She said women routinely told her about being raped or wanting to take their own lives.

She added, at the bare minimum, staff should be paid enough so they can support themselves and go back to a safe home after work to recharge for the next day. And she said she was now at risk of homelessness herself after her landlord said they would be selling her flat.

A psychotherapy scheme for staff, called Life Works, has been cut with the charity saying it was because of “strategic decisions”.

St Mungo’s charity’s chief executive, Emma Haddad, is reportedly on £189,000 a year.

Gareth Davies, who is based at the Covent Garden hostel, said: “Staff are struggling to afford rent, groceries and travel. That has a direct impact on the ability of staff to deliver the services to clients.

“You get very high turnover. Support workers like me, who are working one-to-one with real people, you are asking clients to trust you often with really traumatic, difficult, intimate details about their life.”

This week St Mungo’s employees have been demonstrating outside the organisations owned by trustees of the charity. Unite is asking for a back-dated pay rise of 10 per cent.

A St Mungo’s spokes-person said its latest offer would be made to the union this week, and added: “Bringing an end to this unprecedented period of strike action remains our key priority so we can focus on supporting people at risk of or recovering from homelessness.

“As a charity we have to ensure the nature of our contracts are financially sustainable and we are held accountable for how we spend our funding. Sometimes projects such as Life Works are not sustainable and we have to make strategic decisions…”

On the state of the hostels, they said: “We work and accommodate people in very old London buildings which require significant up-keep and maintenance and sometimes this means running a triage system for repairs.”