A volunteer-run charity that has fed rough sleepers on the same central London street for almost a decade says Westminster City Council has told it that it intends to ban its weekly soup kitchen near Charing Cross, in a dispute the charity says could force the operation to close altogether.
Friends of Essex & London Homeless (FOELH), which runs a Wednesday evening session on Agar Street, WC2, says a sustained enforcement campaign by the Conservative-run council — including demands for waste documentation, visits by enforcement officers and, according to the charity, the threat of a £500 parking charge — has made it "impossible" to operate. The council says the site is not currently safe, citing several kitchens working the same spot at the same time, large crowds of vulnerable people in a confined area, and drug dealers who arrive "looking to exploit the situation".
The row, first reported by the Guardian on Friday, lands three months into a new Conservative administration at Westminster that campaigned explicitly on enforcement, and five weeks into a Labour government whose Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, made ending rough sleeping his first stated instruction on entering Downing Street on 21 July. Westminster has by some distance the highest recorded rough sleeping figures of any London borough.
Phil Jones, an FOELH volunteer, said the charity had been formally notified. "We've received notice from the council that they intend to ban us from operating our weekly soup kitchen in Charing Cross," he said. "They cite litter issues but we clear away all waste and leave the area spotless, so that's just an excuse from them."
Steven Stuart, who founded the charity with his wife, Cheryl, in 2016, said the organisation was "facing increasing challenges with Westminster city council surrounding our weekly Charing Cross outreach", with "various requirements and obstacles" making consistent support harder to deliver. He said enforcement officers had attended on several occasions accompanied by police and security staff.
"The scale and manner of these visits have at times felt intimidating and disproportionate given the nature of the work we are carrying out."
A council spokesperson said soup kitchens "can provide a valuable service but need to be carefully managed", adding that operators "must treat vulnerable people with dignity and take care of the surrounding area". The spokesperson said residents had complained about antisocial behaviour, littering and crime, and concluded: "Currently, the site is not safe for those using the service or the general public."
The council has not confirmed that a prohibition has been issued, and the statement it has given does not describe one. The only account of a formal ban comes from the charity. Neither the statutory basis for any notice nor the correspondence itself has been made public.
The council's factual premise about clustering is, however, supportable from independent records. One Westminster's voluntary sector directory lists a separate group feeding "over 150 people per week in Agar Street, Charing Cross on Mondays between 5:45 to 7pm". Listings published by The Pavement show Refuge Network UK running a Saturday session at Charing Cross and Remar operating on Wednesdays at William IV Street, on the Strand. Refuge Network International's own scheduling shows weekly Saturday sessions running through late August. What is not established is whether other operators have received similar warnings; the council has not said.
The dispute also predates the Guardian's report by around three months. Thurrock Nub News reported in May that the council had ordered the charity to obtain a waste transfer licence and had alleged it was "not operating within its statutes and is leaving waste and litter on the city streets" — a governance allegation that does not appear in the current council statement. Stuart said at the time the charity had "questioned whether this was proportionate or appropriate for a small, entirely volunteer-run charity carrying out a weekly homeless outreach", but confirmed the certificate has since been obtained.
Scale is central to the charity's complaint. Charity Commission records for FOELH, registration number 1178366, show total income of £22,685 and expenditure of £17,862 for the financial year ending 31 May 2024, with three trustees and 29 volunteers. The charity began operating in December 2016 and registered as a charitable incorporated organisation in May 2018. Its two weekly outreaches are at Charing Cross and in Grays, Essex. In April, the Stuarts were nominated for the King's Award for Voluntary Service.
In May, the charity launched a petition calling for a council-run permit system for homeless outreach services, allocating charities specific days and locations so that volunteers are not, in Stuart's words, "blind-sided" by new requirements. Westminster has not said publicly whether it is considering such a scheme.
The political context has shifted sharply. The Conservatives took the council from Labour on 7 May, winning 32 of 54 seats to Labour's 22. Cllr Paul Swaddle became leader on 20 May, promising "safe streets, a clean city, and real value for money", and created a new Cabinet Member for Enforcement post, filled by Cllr Caroline Sargent, who also serves as joint deputy leader. Sargent said earlier this month that residents and businesses "are fed up with rough sleeping sites springing up, and so are we", calling encampments "totally unacceptable in the heart of a capital city" and noting the council spends £8m a year on support ranging from hostels to addiction treatment. That statement was issued in connection with rough sleeping at Grosvenor Gardens, near Victoria, and was not a response to the soup kitchen dispute.
Westminster has attempted something similar before, and retreated. In 2011, the then Conservative-run council proposed a byelaw banning soup runs around Westminster Cathedral, with cabinet member Daniel Astaire arguing it was "wrong and undignified that people are being fed on the streets". St Mungo's and Thames Reach backed the plan; other charities opposed it, around 500 people joined a "protest picnic" outside the cathedral in March that year, and the council ultimately dropped the proposals after 272 objections against 167 in favour, allowing soup runs to continue where organisers cooperated.
There is also legal precedent worth noting: the High Court previously found a council's termination of the Christian Kitchen's licence to operate a soup kitchen in a Walthamstow car park to be unlawful, in a case involving an operation that had run for more than 20 years.
Several elements of the account remain single-sourced to the Guardian, including the £500 parking charge threat, the attendance of enforcement agents with police and security officers, and the full council statement. No BBC, Sky, PA, Reuters or other national coverage of the soup kitchen dispute has yet emerged, and earlier independent reporting has come only from Thurrock Nub News.
Outstanding questions put to the council include how many operators at Charing Cross have received notices, whether any has been formally prohibited, whether the "not operating within its statutes" allegation remains live, and whether a permit scheme is under consideration. Westminster Labour's opposition leader, Cllr Ellie Ormsby, and the local MP, Rachel Blake, have not commented on the case.