So giving them a home often could just start the cycle again, can't it?

Exactly.

The big issue was absolutely dumb in the early days when we raised a sizeable amount of money and went in with a housing association who convinced us that if we raised a quarter of a million pounds, they would house 20 big issue vendors.

At the end of the year, because they didn't give the support that they said they were, They were back on the streets.

So we know from personal experience that just giving somebody a home, looking upon homelessness as something simply to do with I just haven't got a home.

In my opinion, the people I work with and the people I come from 90% of us have inherited poverty.

So we're starting, we're coming from behind and many of us never catch up.

That's what it is, isn't it?

Can we talk through some of the challenges you had to navigate when you started Big Issue? And how did you take this really big problem and come up with a solution that actually is still there and going 35 years later?

Well, probably there were two lots of people who stood in the way of us starting the big issue and starting a means of giving the homeless an honest way of making money so that if they were with drink problems or drug problems or gambling problems, they didn't have to rob people in order to feed their habits.

So I was wanting to give them the same opportunity that if you work in the city of London, for instance, and you want a stimulation in the evening and you wanna have a bit of cocaine or whatever, I don't know, then if you work in the city of London, you don't have to rob anybody for that, you just ring up your dealer.

And what I wanted to do was decriminalize the homeless because they had loads of problems on the streets.

If they weren't drug users or drinkers before they started the streets, if they started living on the streets, they very quickly became users because it was a coping mechanism.

It was a way of blotting out your mind.

So I wanted to give people the chance of making their money legitimately and decriminalize them.

There's a distribution with power and distribution of economy.