Alex Brown, director of the soup kitchen at the American Church in Tottenham Court Road

PENSIONERS are among the worrying rise in rough sleepers on Tottenham Court Road, a charity warned this week.

An urgent meeting was called by the American Church and the Fitzrovia Partnership to bring residents, businesses and community groups together to discuss how we can best help people experiencing homelessness.

The busy high street has seen a huge surge in people sleeping in tents over the last year. There were concerns among the community that encampments could be forcibly removed, as was the case last November when tents outside University College London Hospital were chucked in the back of a bin truck.

“We feed somewhere between 200-240 people a day,” Alex Brown, director of the Soup Kitchen that operates out of the American Church six days a week, told the meeting.

“Traditionally our numbers have been 70 per cent rough sleepers, 30 per cent people who are struggling to feed themselves. But now our numbers are about 50-50.

“What we’ve seen specifically in the last two years or so is more and more people coming in who are pension age. It’s especially difficult when you see someone with a walker or a freedom pass around their neck. It should never ever happen at all.”

Councillor Rishi Madlani said that data from March revealed that a third of rough sleepers in the area were new to the streets.

He said: “Often councils like to be top of league tables and unfortunately we are on top by local authorities by numbers of a rough sleepers that we have in our borough and second only to Westminster. It’s not a league table we want to be top of.”

Mario Demetriou from the developer Lazari said it spends “hundreds of thousands”’ a year on remedial works and enforcement companies like My Local Bobby to deal with “antisocial behaviour” from people experiencing homelessness.

But he said “all we’re doing is just shifting the problem further down the road”, and called for longer term solutions.

Mick Atkinson from the Fitzrovia Partnership said that a “formal report from a special arborist” has been done on a large plane tree by the American Church.

The report said the tents and pallets at the base of the tree are “restricting rainfall”. “People living in those tents are urinating, defecating on the base of the tree. The acidity from that is killing the tree,” he said.

Resident Tony Travers suggested the need for more services in the area to help rough sleepers, including building public toilets and showers.

The meeting discussed the difference between antisocial behaviour and rough sleeping. Konstantinos Domnidis, the owner of a furniture shop next door, said they sometimes experience losses and clients are “avoiding” visiting the shop at certain times because of “antisocial” incidents happening on the street outside.

Michael O’Grady, who is the lead police officer on homelessness in Camden, and who was also present at the eviction of rough sleepers from Huntley Street last year, said: “Tottenham Court Road is a busy footfall area. In terms of antisocial behaviour, yeah there is antisocial behaviour whether it be open drug use begging shoplifting. A lot of that goes on.

“Unfortunately, we are going to have issues with drugs. That’s unfortunately that’s where society is at the moment. “Some of these clients have been through lots of trauma in their life. And unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues – and I might be dissing some of my colleagues – have got a very negative view of the street population, which is unfair.”

David Kaner, who chairs the safer neighbourhood panels, said: “Don’t assume if somebody looks homeless and is causing antisocial behaviour that it’s homeless people causing the problem.  “There are plenty of people we see out on the streets who don’t cause trouble to anybody at all. So don’t condemn everybody because of a few.”