Rough sleeping to rise unless local authorities provide more affordable housing
Thames Reach helps people off the streets and into temporary hostel beds, from where they can move into more suitable accommodation.
But permanent housing in is short supply. Many of the most vulnerable hostel residents wait for up to two years to find a flat or bedsit of their own.
If local authorities across London contributed just 10 flats each, then over 300 current hostel residents could move on, opening up beds for those rough sleepers who are still out in the cold.
Permanent housing means a permanent place in society. It's time for local authorities to act.
The campaign
Thames Reach launched it's 'No vacancies' campaign in 2004. It calls on local authorities to free up more flats for the capital’s hostel residents, warning that a failure to act will lead to a rise in the number of people sleeping rough.
The campaign highlights the fact that hostels, meant as short-stay provision where individuals can readjust to life away from the street before moving on, are now housing people long term.
A bottleneck has developed which means that moving on from hostels, which three years ago most residents could confidently expect to do between nine months and a year, can commonly take two years for the most vulnerable residents.
This bottleneck results in desperation and frustration among hostel residents. It is also disastrous for people sleeping on the capital’s streets and waiting for hostel vacancies to materialise. In a city with over 3,000 hostel bedspaces, there are often only a handful of vacancies on any one night, far fewer than the number of people sleeping rough.
Thames Reach is urging local authorities across London to contribute only ten flats each to a pool of accommodation for people in hostels meaning 330 people could move on and free up bedspaces for those left out in the cold. In 1995 a similar scheme enabled 435 people to secure permanent housing through this route. This escape route has now disappeared.
Jeremy Swain, Thames Reach Chief Executive, said: “Hostels are bursting at the seams with people desperate to move forward with their lives but nowhere to go. Homeless people have often lived itinerant life-styles, moving from one borough to another, and individual local authorities may be reluctant to accept them as their responsibility. In 2004, it seems that local authorities are no longer prepared to act together to tackle homelessness amongst a group of people easily forgotten - out of sight is out of mind.
“Without local authorities seizing the initiative and breaking the bottleneck in London’s hostels through a collaborative response, London’s homelessness problem will not be solved, and the slow and inexorable rise in street homelessness will begin again, causing much suffering and undoing the tremendous achievements of the last few years. The two thirds reduction in the numbers of people sleeping rough of which the government is rightly proud is under threat.”
The charity sent 2,000 posters to central and local government representatives as well as supporters and stakeholders, and ran series of advertisements in magazines. The poster/ad depicts a listings page for accommodation in London with every entry crossed out alongside the headline No Vacancies, corresponding with Thames Reach’s experience in trying to place hostel residents in suitable settled accommodation.
