A waste company has apologised after its workers were filmed taking a homeless woman’s possessions away in their truck. Footage shows two Veolia employees in hi-vis removing the personal items - some sealed in plastic - and a mattress from outside Boots.
Katie Whitcombe said she watched in horror as the workmen disposed of the rough sleeper’s belongings. “She's now going to come back and have nothing, even though she's got nothing at all anyway,” Miss Whitcombe said.
Dover District Council (DDC), which launched an investigation and Veolia, the authority’s waste contractors, says its street cleaning crews will now undertake “refresher training” to stop a repeat of the incident. Miss Whitcombe said: “Just to throw items away like that - and for her to not even know about it, and just come back and have no knowledge of what's happened - must be hard for that lady.
“She might think someone’s stolen it, but little does she know it's the council that has taken it.” Veolia says the items were “incorrectly removed” on December 27 “following a request made via the public portal”.
But Miss Whitcombe said: “It’s heartless. Over the Christmas and New Year period, when people are more vulnerable and in the cold and potentially in harder times, to just have very little care and compassion is heartbreaking.”
She says that some of the items in the pile included things which appeared to have been gifted to the homeless woman over Christmas. There was also reportedly a tiny vase of flowers Miss Whitcombe added: “Knowing that locals have gone out of their way to purchase these items to gift to them, to help them, and knowing that they've just been disposed of and not put to good use as they should be, it's just heartbreaking.
“So many people and families are going without, and so many homeless people are going without. We do not know that this lady didn't have medications, something very sentimental in her very few personal belongings that she did have.”
Miss Whitcombe says that she wanted to stop the workers as it happened, but that the job was carried out so quickly, she did not have the chance. Instead, she called the street pastors' outreach team and told them what had happened, so that they could offer the woman support.
A Veolia spokesperson said: “We are very sorry that personal belongings were incorrectly removed from Dover High Street by a Veolia street cleansing team on December 27. We understand the impact this will have had. The items were cleared following a request made via the public portal. Veolia and the council have policies in place to ensure that any items collected from the street are only removed once a person no longer needs them, and we regret that this process was not followed in this instance.
“Refresher training will be delivered to Veolia street cleansing crews on how to handle requests to remove belongings to prevent incidents like this happening again.”
