Are you or anyone you know, homeless? My guess is, most of you will say no. It’s a small proportion of the population, but it is growing year on year.
I will give you some facts and figures a little later, but first I would like to introduce you to Tom.
Tom is Gloucestershire born and bred, and maybe he’s made some unfortunate decisions in his life, done some stupid things, but… Did you know that the first thing Glos’ housing services do if you ask them for help with housing, is to try and deny responsibility for you. They tell you to prove that you’re homeless, prove that you have a ‘connection’to the town you’re asking for help in, they deny you access to a foodbank as you don’t have an address, they don’t care if you’re a victim or perpetrator of abuse, they will always try to force you to return to the familial home if you have one. Once you’ve survived on the streets for a while and developed an addiction to drugs or alcohol, if you didn’t already have those issues, they might offer you a room in shared accommodation (you really wouldn’t want to see the state of the places they try to put you in) filled with people who may have serious mental health or drink or drug issues. I interviewed Tom in an attempt to raise this issue in people’s awareness, here is the video ..
https://youtu.be/wJwCOWKuFzY?si=i2DgYYgxfHdL18xh
Tom is just one person, already part of the unwanted, unseen, unheard group of vulnerable people that many of us ordinary people and definitely the councils and government, ignore ..
There are of course many different kinds of homelessness. Families with no home, single people leaving bad situations, young people leaving care, ex services, the list is endless..
In Gloucestershire the population is approximately 660K. The county has six councils. Gloucester, Cheltenham, Stroud, Cotswold, Forest of Dean and Tewkesbury, all responsible for housing in their communities. Cheltenham and the Forest Of Dean don’t publish housing waiting list figures, so we’ve estimated it from the figures we do have. It comes to approximately 17,300.. These might be entire families, couples, as well as single people. That’s between 2.5% and 10% of the population. So we have a problem don’t you think? And people like Tom are at the bottom of a very big pile! ..
it’s estimated that nationally there’s a 52 year wait for social housing ! We must start looking at solutions! Such as the Blue Lantern project, and start putting housing first. Instead of subcontracting the problem out to private entities who make a profit out of our homeless.
