Cuts to council budgets for single homeless people are financial lunacy

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/08/single-homeless-people-council-budget-cuts-lunacy

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When I show visitors the training and education centres at our homeless charity Crisis, they have on occasion been puzzled. Why art classes? What good to a homeless person is a sculpture workshop? The answer is simple: everyone is different. People end up homeless for a thousand different, often intertwined, reasons. To help someone rebuild their life, you must address their particular needs. And many people need the respite of a quiet hour's artwork as a first step into other services.

That is why I am so worried about last week's revelation that councils have cut budgets for single homeless people by a quarter since 2010. These budget cuts will leave homeless people falling further and further from help – particularly cruel when you consider the increasing damage homelessness does to a person.

The effect is to hollow out services for homeless people. Where a hostel might have had a mental health professional on site, or a specialist women-only group, there will now be just the bare bones: beds, rooms, four walls and a roof. There will no longer be any way to ask why people are here, let alone help them with their problems.

This is happening now. In 2013, half of homelessness projects with decreases in funding laid off staff, while a third reported reducing the provision of "meaningful activities". The result: 74% of homelessness agencies refused people whose needs were "too high" to manage, up from 63% in 2012.

It comes at a terrible time. Since 2010 homelessness has soared. Rough sleeping is up; over 100,000 households came to their local council as homeless last year, and we have no way to count the tens of thousands more stuck in squats or on the floors of friends and family. The support they need now and in the future is being decimated by these budget cuts.

Looking at it coldly, it is financial lunacy. Condemning people to long-term homelessness is incredibly expensive for society, which has to pick up the pieces. It is much cheaper (and, of course, more humane) to address someone's mental health issues when they first show up in a hostel, rather than let them end up a rough sleeper and in A&E.

After eight years at the head of Crisis, I will soon be leaving. I will miss seeing someone move from being homeless to a secure and stable life. With the right services in place it can be done. I have seen it many times.

I expect our homelessness services nationally to try to help people out of homelessness, and not implement cruel and stupid budget cuts that throw people on the scrapheap. These cuts have to be reversed, for all our sakes.