With more almost one million under-25s currently unemployed - including more than 76,000 who have been out of work for more than 12 months - young people like those we support at Centrepoint can find themselves a long way down the pecking order when it comes to securing a job. The simple donation of a suit can help build their confidence and raise their aspirations.
I don't think anyone seriously denies that welfare reform of some sort is necessary, whether to reduce waste and fraud, to re-establish proper incentive for the unemployed to look for work, or to help restore order to public finances. Around these basic points there's consensus. The question is, however, reforms at what cost, and to whom?
Viktor Orban has considered his party's political majority not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity to consolidate his party's grip on the state, media and judiciary. International and European institutions, civil society and human rights organisations, opposition parties, and even the United States, have closely scrutinised and criticised the gradual 'Orbanization' of Hungary.
Telling us that the deficit is the priority when families are homeless and starving shows a government astonishingly out of touch. It needs to back its early promises, and understand that redistributing money to those that need it from those who don't deserve it (some might even say from perpetrator to victim, in a roundabout way) will demonstrate that this we really are all in this together and that it isn't redundant, dogmatic ideology that is providing the impetus.
The prospects for young people starting out in the world today are already bleak with nearly one million young people currently unemployed - and now life is about to get even harder for them. The reckless proposal to remove housing benefits from under-25s risks leaving some of this country's most vulnerable young people out in the cold. What makes this proposal particularly distasteful is that in reality only a mere eight per cent of total housing benefits are claimed by under-25s, making this a policy which risks causing long-term harm to the lives of young people for the sake of a few headlines.
We desperately need housing to be a national priority to deliver a huge increase in new homes. Our continued failure to tackle this problem head on hits millions of families hard, denies people the opportunity to buy their own home, traps increasing numbers of working people in benefit dependency at huge cost to the public purse and acts as a real brake on economic growth.
What I have learned from this is that while many of these people do need basic amenities such as food and clothing, what they are also equally in need of is companionship and community. Unfortunately because of their situation, homeless people are often marginalised from society and find difficulty in accessing the most basic of support.