Homeless man dies outside entrance to Houses of Parliament

Gyula Remes, a 43-year-old homeless Hungarian national, has died after he was found outside the entrance to the Houses of Parliament.

The man collapsed near Westminster station last night, “close to an entrance used by MPs and parliamentary staff”, reports the London Evening Standard.

British Transport Police (BTP) were called to the entrance of parliament near Westminster underground station at 11.30pm on Tuesday night. Although officers administered first aid and took Remes to hospital, he died hours later.

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Remes’s cause of death is not known “but his friends say he had taken the street drug Spice that night as well as drunk alcohol”, reports HuffPost.

Remes’s friend Gabor Kasza, 22, told the Press Association: “He was drinking, very heavily, and someone gave him some kind of cigarette which he smoked.”

“He said he was going to lie down and then when I came back a few hours later, he was all blue. We couldn't resuscitate him. It was definitely Spice.”

Kasza added that his fellow Hungarian had recently begun work as a chef’s assistant. He said that Remes was due to receive his first pay cheque “some time this week”, which he had hoped would enable him to get off the streets for good.

“He was drinking heavily because he had just got a job and he was all happy that he wasn’t going to be homeless any more,” the Kasza said.

David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said in tweet: “There is something rotten in Westminster when MP’s walk past dying homeless people on the way into work. 24,000 people homeless on our streets this Christmas and our Government playing reckless with a No Deal Brexit. Plague on their Houses.”

Remes “is the second homeless person to have died outside Parliament this year”, reports The Independent. In February a rough sleeper from Brazil, Marcos Amaral Gourgel, was discovered dead just metres from an entrance to the House of Commons.

The news comes as the Office of National Statistics revealed that nearly 600 homeless people died on the UK’s streets in the last year.

The figure marks a 24% increase over the last five years. London and the North West of England had the highest mortality of homeless people, both in numbers of deaths and per million population of the region.

In total 84% of homeless deaths were men, and the mean age at death of homeless people was 44 years for men and 42 years for women.