Outreach teams cut rough sleeping
Nearly 90 of the 205 rough sleepers identified as being permanently on the streets of London have been helped into accommodation.
Charity Homeless Link made the announcement last week, with 1,000 days to go before the Olympics.
The government has pledged to eradicate rough sleeping before the games in 2012.
Jenny Edwards, chief executive of Homeless Link, said: ‘We are 1,000 days from the goal of ending rough sleeping. This ambition started with our members, who solve, on a daily basis, the individual homelessness of people who others have given up on.
‘We are very encouraged by the strategic work of the London Delivery Board, directed by the Mayor of London.
‘In less than nine months, nearly 90 of the 205 rough sleepers who have been identified by London’s outreach teams as amongst the most entrenched, have been successfully helped into accommodation.’
So-called entrenched rough sleepers are usually the hardest to get into accommodation, Ms Edwards added.
‘The achievement of getting nearly half of these individuals off the streets is a testament to the value of partnership working between the public and third sectors and a focus on achieving common goals,’ she said.
Communities and Local Government department figures have consistently shown homelessness in England has been reducing. This summer it reported the number of people accepted as homeless between January and March this year was 11,350, - down 4,080 from the same period in 2008.
But charity Broadway released information from the rough sleeping database Combined Homelessness and Information Network in the same month, which suggested the number of people rough sleeping in the capital is going up. It said the number of people sleeping rough and in contact with outreach and homelessness teams in London between April 2008 and March 2009 was 3,472 - a rise of 455 on the previous year.
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Readers' comments (3)
Joe Halewood | 02/11/2009 3:03 pm
So 90 out of 3,472 then!
"We are 1000 days from ending rough sleeping" are we?
Surely days is not spelled L-I-G-H-T Y-E-A-R-S.
When very highly respected practitioners come out with ridiculous comments such as this they become part of the establishment and lose the will to fight what they set out to do.
One rough sleeper off the streets and into (settled) accommodation is progress and 90 is genuinely very good.
Yet you cant say 90 of the 205 most entrenched is good as the meaning is nonsensical. The most entrenched are by definition those that have yet to be found. And why focus on 205 of 3472? Because they are nearest to the site of the Olympic stadium perhaps?
Also by definition rough sleepers are transient - they move for pitys sake!
Once upon a time leading homeless lobbies fought against such self-evident cleansing of rough sleepers from a given geographical location. But as with the Olympixcs and the fact that CLG permits and advocates rough sleepers being 'repatriated' to their original locale as in SP guidance - such lobbies used to rail against such blatant discrimination of these very vulnerable people. Now they are seen as being complicit is such unashamed funding chasing and spin of the establishment.
So, yes, 90 is good - but its 90 - a tiny percentage of the real rough sleeper figures and a huge way to go ....well only 97.5% to go
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Jim Paton | 04/11/2009 0:26 am
The figure for homlessness "acceptances" really has nothing to do with rough sleeping and is heavily manipulated by "gatekeeping".
Street homelessness, whether people adopt the visible strategies on which these efforts focus exclusively or the invisible ones which are never mentioned, is a churn. What does "helped into accommodation" mean and how many of those 90 people will still be there or housed elsewhere in a few months or even weeks?
People's reasons for so-called "rough sleeping" are varied. One of them is relative safety and / or freedom compared with the accommodation on offer. Before anyone jumps on that, I did say "relative".
Not tipping more and more people onto the streets would help, too. Tower Hamlets is lining up to evict around 1,000 squatters in the next few months, many of whom are already on the move.
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Jenny Edwards | 06/11/2009 4:49 pm
I think readers may be confused by figures from 3 different sets of statistics being in one short piece. The 205 identified in central London boroughs are some of a relatively small group of rough sleepers who have been sleeping out regularly or for 5 years or more. Thanks to some dedicated work by outreach teams really listening to the issues that are important for different people half have now places in accommodation. Not all will stay but nevertheless it is a big step forward for a group who have tended to risk being missed out by been perceived as "entrenched".
The CHAIN figure represents the number of people over the course of a year who will have been seen sleeping on London streets. About half are only seen once and find their way out of rough sleeping without needing homeless focused services. Only about 4% were seen 10 times or more. The best picture we have is that on any single night about a 10th of this number will actually be sleeping on the streets.
The whole point of starting up a strategy to solve people's homelessness 3 years before the Olympics arrives is to learn not to repeat the "sweeping out of the way" short term approach that has happened with past Olympic Games. We want to see people in homes, not swept awy for a couple of weeks. That's a great ambition. We might not get there but we will have a damned good try and frontline staff (increasingly drawn from people who have had direct experience of homelessness) are working with great energy and conviction to give us the best chance possible.
Jim is right to identify churn as an issue. There has been some real change in many of the main buildings and services over recent year so that more people move on positively and dont return to the streets. There's more to be done and we have a project to reduce churn, which has been helped a lot by insights from homeless people.
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