14 THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Patrick Mooney, editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance
IS A SOLUTION TO HOMELESSNESS IN SIGHT?
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance, discusses the rise in homelessness in recent years, and takes a look at some potential solutions.
A
direct link between the country’s austerity programme of spending cuts and the rising tide of homelessness has
been made by opposition politicians, but rather than accepting this as inevitable, a growing number of councils are actively fighting back and investing in new initiatives and building new homes.
Our public finances have borne the brunt of expenditure cuts over the last decade, with many councils seeing their income levels cut by between 24 and 30 per cent. This has seen services pared back, often to providing the bare minimum levels of service demanded by the law.
The harsh nature and extent of the cuts
are seen all too readily in the figures for homelessness and rough sleeping. Figures for rough sleeping in London reached an all-time high of 8,855 people in 2018/19, as they jumped by almost a fifth on the previous
year. This included 5,529 people who were new to rough sleeping, the equivalent of an extra 15 people a day losing their homes and having nowhere else to go. The figures came from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network, whose outreach workers provide a more accurate picture than the official statistics, based on a single night’s count. These recorded just 1,283 rough sleepers in London in 2018.
NATIONAL DISGRACE The figures represent a rise of 250 per cent from ten years ago, when 3,673 people were identified as rough sleeping in London. The increase was dubbed a “national disgrace” by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who blamed the crisis on welfare reforms and a lack of investment in social housing. Mayor Khan was echoing a message from national politicians in the Labour Party who said
ROUGH SLEEPING IN LONDON REACHED AN ALL-TIME HIGH OF 8,855 PEOPLE IN 2018/19
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