London 2011: Homeless men forced to sleep in bins
Homeless men are sleeping rough among piles of household rubbish in a desperate attempt to stay alive this winter.
The scandal of "the bin men of Southall" is exposed today after the Standard discovered the appalling conditions endured by more than 50 people on the Havelock estate. Every night they slide down rubbish chutes into huge wheelie bins and then spend the night huddled in sleeping bags on the floor.
Labourer Pirthy Sandhu, 39, said: "We get massive rats crawling over us at night and sometimes foxes jump into the bins and we have to chase them out. The place is disgusting but we have nowhere else to go and on freezing nights it's a roof over our heads to keep us dry before the caretaker throws us out at 6am."
Ferah Ud-din, of Ealing Drug and Alcohol Intervention and Support, said: "It's really horrid. They're sleeping beside the bins, in alleyways and graveyards. The first time I ever went out I saw a group of six lads sleeping on a mattress. The image has never left my head."
About 50 others are sleeping rough under the M4 flyover at Heston. A charity working with the Sikh community in Ealing, SWAT, estimates there could be 150 rough sleepers in the borough.
Some of the homeless have lost their jobs and are unable to claim help because they have overstayed their visa. Others have drug and alcohol problems. Volunteers at SWAT, which benefited from a £2,000 grant from the Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund, hand out free sleeping bags to rough sleepers.
Today the Dispossessed Fund invites applications for the next round of grants for groups tackling deprivation in London.
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