a further \u00a3432m to sustain the support into next year<\/a>. A number of charities had raised concerns that people would simply end up back on the streets after Christmas. Burnham said he was \u201cbringing together businesses, charities and local leaders in Downing Street to make sure this is a solution that lasts\u201d.<\/p>\nThose who work in the homelessness sector have warned there is no easy solution. The Guardian has spoken to several formerly homeless people to find out what helped them back into housing, sometimes after decades of sleeping on the streets.<\/p>\n
Amy Bell, 37, was street homeless and struggling with heroin addiction for seven years between 2013 and 2020. She said she hit \u201crock bottom\u201d when her council said it could offer her only a voucher for a two-man tent, which she \u201ccried herself to sleep in at night\u201d.<\/p>\n
The next morning, workers employed by the same council put her tent and all her belongings in the bin because it was classed as litter. Borrowing a phone from a Citizens Advice centre, she secured a place at a hostel for a few weeks, which enabled her to reconnect with a local drug treatment service, get a phone with a sim card and start to rebuild.<\/p>\n
She said being offered a bed in a hostel, even though she was still taking drugs, was the key to getting her off the streets. \u201cThe hostel system is broken. You are basically set up to fail,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t accommodate people with addiction problems, and that\u2019s who it should be for. Eventually you will do something that shows you are still using and they ban you. It doesn\u2019t take long to get kicked out of all of them. And then you\u2019re left with nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amy Bell, who was homeless for seven years, says rough sleepers need help from real people rather than mobile phone apps<\/p>\n
Bell said for Burnham to succeed in abolishing rough sleeping he must get rid of the \u201cridiculous bureaucracy\u201d that stops people from accessing support.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is done by app now. When you\u2019re homeless, you don\u2019t have that \u2013 believe me, if you get a decent phone, you sell it,\u201d she said. \u201cThe days of being able to walk into the Citizens Advice bureau or the jobcentre don\u2019t exist any more. Homeless people need a real-life person to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others the Guardian spoke to said they moved from England to Scotland because it was easier to get help there after it abolished the priority needs test in 2012. According to Crisis, Scotland has some of the most progressive homelessness rights in the world.<\/p>\n
Tony* became homeless after being released from prison in 2024. He told his probation officer he had nowhere to go but was simply advised to contact a council homelessness team the day of his release.<\/p>\n
No housing was available and he ended up sleeping in a tent in the woods. \u201cI was a prison leaver, I hadn\u2019t made myself intentionally homeless, but there was nothing. The support was nonexistent,\u201d he said. \u201cI was telling my probation officer where I\u2019m sleeping at our weekly meetings but they didn\u2019t help.\u201d<\/p>\n
A chance meeting led him to the Salvation Army, where he has been living in supported accommodation for the past two years. With evidence suggesting the amount of people being released from prison into homelessness<\/a> is on the rise, Tony said the government must deal with this issue if it wanted to end rough sleeping.<\/p>\n\u201cI was in for three years, and they only started talking to me about accommodation 10 days before I was released,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019d been set up with a bedsit or something like that, the government would have paid less in the long run. I would have begrudgingly gone to a hostel but that wasn\u2019t even offered. Something has to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
* Some names have been changed to protect anonymity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martin Fletcher had been homeless for more than 20 years after being made redundant before he finally got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}