Response to strategy consultation, ‘Creating Sustainable Communities’, run by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister as part of the Supporting People programme, March 2006
Thames Reach’s experience in London is that services are becoming increasingly localised. This has a detrimental impact on the group of itinerant and often challenging homeless people who regularly cross borough boundaries and struggle to establish a local connection.
Our main objective is to ensure the protection and development of services for these vulnerable, mobile people, many of whom have no statutory rights.
We support the expectation that local government and other agencies focus properly on the needs of people experiencing or at risk of social exclusion.
The most effective way of ensuring that local authorities continue to do this is for them to receive grants for Supporting People services.
The proposed distribution formula for funding is destabilising and should not be adopted in its current form.
