http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,1594903,00.html

No direction home
'A day with Ryzard is like a journey through a secret city.' In the first of
a three-part series on poverty, award-winning writer Nick Davies encounters
a new underclass

Read background facts on migrant workers

Wednesday October 19, 2005

Guardian

Ryzard studied banking and finance in Warsaw. He has ended up in a bank in
London - sleeping in its doorway. He speaks English, has a gentle obsession
with chess, and came to London to work, to earn enough to finish his
studies. He has ended up virtually destitute.
Last year, under pressure from rightwing newspapers, the prime minister
agreed that although East Europeans could come to the UK and work and pay
tax and national insurance like all other members of the European Union,
they would not be allowed to claim the welfare benefits for which they were
paying, unless they had continuous employment for at least a year. In the
meantime, they would live on a narrow edge where they could cling to work
and survive - or they could fall without a safety net.

It is half past six in the morning. Ryzard rolls up his sleeping bag and
sets off for a day of survival. He calls it "walking for food", tramping
miles in search of the soup kitchens where he can eat, and of the hidden
refuges where he can find the others who, like him, have fallen off the edge
and tumbled back to the days of Dickensian London. A day with Ryzard is a
journey through a secret city.

In among some trees in a small park by the Thames, we find Adam and Josef
living together on an abandoned sofa. Adam was working until a few weeks
ago, when he was set upon by English youths and beaten up so badly that he
qualified for NHS emergency treatment. While he was hospitalised, he lost
his job and, therefore, could no longer pay £50 a week for the bedroom he
had been sharing with two other men in Acton, west London. Josef is still
working, but he earns a pittance and sends almost all of it back to Poland,
where he has six children to support.

We find Kristof, who has been living under a railway bridge in Hammersmith.
He is aged 38, from Gliwice in southern Poland. He worked and paid his UK
tax and national insurance for nine months before he was cut down by bladder
cancer. NHS doctors told him they did not know whether they were allowed to
operate on him since he had not clocked up a full year of continuous work.
They delayed and then, despite the risk of trouble for themselves, they
removed the tumour.

But the four weeks in hospital cost him his job. He was too weak to work. He
was still not entitled to claim any benefit, so he ended up under the
railway bridge, with an infection in his operation wound, a kidney infection
that was twisting him with pain, with no money at all, and with a sheet of
cardboard and some packing paper for a sick bed. He is very thin.

Under the trees on Brook Green, we find Alex, who was an anaesthetist in
Lithuania. He was doing well in London, with a job and a shared room, until
some Polish men got him drunk and stole everything - cash, mobile phone,
shoes and, worst of all, the paperwork that allowed him to work. So Alex
fell.

In a soup kitchen, we find a 50-year-old Polish welder called Stanislav
whose home is a supermarket car park in Hammersmith; two Lithuanians who
live under a buddleia bush behind a stone staircase in a small park; and
several men who live more or less permanently in one of the terminals at
Heathrow airport.

Ryzard walks and talks. Like the others, he is infuriated at the idea that
they have come to London to claim benefits - as though they really would
leave their friends and families and travel across Europe to claim
jobseeker's allowance worth £8 a day. Most of them are skilled; some are
highly educated. They have come to work, to send money home to protect their
families from the raging unemployment the free market has bestowed on their
country. Some of them have succeeded. One of Ryzard's friends is now running
his own building company.

Feeling of failure

Ryzard, too, was doing well until about a month ago. He had been working for
a decorating company, sub-contracting and earning good money. Suddenly, he
started to feel depressed. He's not sure why: he had a feeling of failure
and he couldn't function any more. He started sleeping 12 or 13 hours a day
and, when he was awake, all he wanted to do was to play chess in internet
cafes. He stopped showing up to supervise the two jobs he was running at the
time; the men he had hired did terrible work; he had already laid out money
on the jobs; but he didn't get paid, and the decorating company refused to
give him more work. Before he knew it, he was £3,000 in debt and with no
source of income. You can't make mistakes if you have no safety net.

Within a few days, he had to leave the flat in north London he had been
sharing with two other men. He found himself with 10p in his pocket and
nowhere to sleep. It was 10 at night and it was cold. He walked for five
hours and reached Victoria station, but it was closed. For two days he
simply wandered, eating nothing, creeping into the emergency department of
Charing Cross hospital to sleep until they threw him out.

On the third day, he had two pieces of luck. First, he met an entirely
drunken man who told him about a church in Hammersmith that would give him
food, and so he ate. Second, he trekked to the house of a friend in Neasden,
north London, who lent him £100, which allowed him, among other things, to
buy a one-week bus pass so that he could sleep on the night buses. Briefly,
he stayed in a flat with a junky in Peckham, south London, but it was
filthy, and when the junky started threatening him for cash, he headed back
to the streets, where he simply walked for miles each day until, a week or
so later, he had another piece of luck. He met up with a homeless Jamaican
man who saw the blisters on his feet and said he could sleep on the floor
with him in a squat near Waterloo station in central London.

Now, we reach that same squat. From the outside, the building appears to
have died. The roof is sprouting weeds, the windows are boarded up, the
doors are sealed, apart from one where a cardboard curtain hangs over the
smashed glass that once filled its frame. Inside, it is a little worse.
There is no electricity, although the cables hang down from the ceilings.
There is no water, although it bubbles down from somewhere upstairs. There
are piles of rubble on the floor, busted bin bags full of garbage piled up
against the walls, a broken cooker, a broken toilet, a bucket full of old
urine, graffiti on the walls, and men sleeping on just about all the clear
floorspace. Most of them have mattresses, which Ryzard says they found in
rubbish skips. Some of them lie under their coats, some under a single
blanket.

It seems there have been people sleeping here for many months. Ryzard says
they found the building accidentally. "It looks like nobody lives here," he
says. "But we do."

All of these men have been pushed over the edge. Most speak no English. As a
result, many of them have been duped: illegally conned out of money by job
agencies; put to work at wages way below the national minimum; hired for
work and simply never paid. Some of them have been beaten by bureaucracy:
they are told they can't have a full-time job unless they have a bank
account, and they cannot get a bank account unless they have a permanent
address, but they can't have a permanent address unless they have a
full-time job to pay for a deposit and rent in advance.

The mere fact of being destitute makes it harder to find work. Most have no
phones to arrange job interviews. Their clothes may be dirty, they will not
have shaved. Ryzard recently picked up a job decorating, but could not carry
on because he was so exhausted from sleeping rough.

He had earned £200 and thought he could double it by buying a stolen laptop
computer from two men he had met on Wimbledon Park station, then selling it
for £400. He shared his plan with his friend from Neasden, who gave him £200
to buy him a laptop too.

Penniless again

As he left his friend's house at around midnight, with £400 in cash in his
pocket, a group of young men asked him for a cigarette, then grabbed him and
started demanding money. He managed to get away, but things only got worse.
He met up with the men with the stolen computers, who sat in their car and
showed him a laptop still in its box. He handed over £200, they handed over
the box, and it was only after they had driven off that he discovered they
had swapped the boxes and given him one that contained only three bottles of
water. He returned £200 to his friend, and was penniless again.

Unlike most of these men, Ryzard has clocked up enough work to qualify for
benefit. He first came here several years before Poland joined the EU and he
has the paperwork to prove he has paid UK tax and national insurance for
four years. When he became homeless, he went to claim jobseeker's allowance
and was told it would take at least five weeks to process his claim. Four
months later, they ruled that he was entitled to nothing. They gave no
explanation.

· Some names have been changed.