ROOF Blog

The Salvation Army is to rebrand its hostels for the homeless as LifeHouses. Maff Potts, Salvation Army’s director of homelessness services said: ‘This is a defining moment for the Salvation Army. The word ‘hostel’ was linked with old-style warehousing of people and didn’t convey that there’s more to our support services than simply housing. LifeHouse clearly demonstrates that we are about providing purpose and relationships - two words which are at the heart of our delivery of support services.’ Around 3,500 people stay at the organisation’s 83 UK and Ireland centres each night. The charity will also expand activities run in the centres, and the training offered to improve the self-esteem, mental health and employment prospects of the people using the centres.

The number of rough sleepers in London has risen by 15 per cent in the last year, fuelled by an increase in Eastern Europeans who have lost their jobs and now make up one in seven of those living on the street. According to the figures from Broadway more than 4,600 rough sleepers were counted in the capital last year, up from just over 4,000, with around 60 per cent of street homeless being British born.

Homeless charity, Crisis, has been investigating the experience single rough sleepers face when seeking help from local councils. Most were discouraged from filing in formal applications to register as homeless, and many were deterred from even seeing a housing officer. A spokesperson from the charity said that there was widespread practice of councils using the priority need test as an excuse not to give single homeless people the minimum levels of advice and assistance to what they are entitled to.

The mental health problems faced by rough sleepers has reached a ‘critical level’ following a rise in the homelessness rate, St Mungo’s has found. Among its clients, 40 per cent were diagnosed with depression and 22 per cent were diagnosed with schizophrenia, which St Mungo’s called ‘the tip of the iceberg’. It warned that the government’s target to end homelessness in London by 2012 will be missed unless the link between mental health and homelessness is broken. There has been a 15 per cent rise in the homelessness rate in London in the past year – the equivalent of five new rough sleepers a day.

St Mungo’s is seeking youth workers’ views on mental health and homelessness for a report. It said the proportion of homeless people with mental health problems remain static, at around a third, despite a reduction in the number of street homeless in the past decade, and warned the government would fail to hit its target of no rough sleepers by 2012 if it didn’t focus more on the link between mental health and homelessness.

The number of homeless people has been grossly underestimated, the Simon Community charity says. The latest official survey counted 484 rough sleepers across the country, but Simon Community says the head count does not only include people asleep in doorways, parks or on benches. In one night in London alone, the charity found 212 people sleeping rough, and the figures for other areas are distorted because authorities with less than 10 homeless people round the figure down to zero.

The government will fail in its target to end rough sleeping by 2012 if it continues to ignore services for homeless people with mental health problems, Crisis and St Mungo’s warned today. A survey for St Mungo’s disclosed that as many as 85 per cent of rough sleepers were in poor mental health. Women, refugees and asylum seekers, the BME community and those who mistreat drugs and alcohol are particularly affected.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are living in the UK in a ‘twilight zone’ of extreme poverty, no housing and no right to work. A report from the refugee charity Pafras says on average failed asylum seekers were surviving on £7.65 per week, but the majority lived on less than £5. The charity called the destitution a ‘deliberate’ policy to force asylum seekers out of the country. As many as 72 per cent of failed asylum seekers had spent time sleeping rough outside following their asylum refusal.

Eastern European immigrants who have been living rough in London are being flown home in a government-backed scheme. Thames Reach charity is helping coordinate the scheme, providing support to the small number of people from Eastern Europe who have been unable to find work and housing in the capital, and have ended up in poverty and struggling with benefits.

Following yesterday’s Homeless Link report into rough sleeping in London, the mayor Boris Johnson has pledged to end street homelessness by 2012. There has been a decline in the number of rough sleepers throughout the country, but London is the only region that has failed to meet the government’s 1998 commitment to reduce numbers by two-thirds. Half the country’s street homeless people live in London.