A homelessness emergency
How do the Emergency Services interact with Homeless people?
Brighton, home of the Pavilion and holiday destination, seems a wonderful place to live. But it has an ongoing and increasingly urgent crisis of homelessness. Neil Vowles argues that cuts to legal aid and charities, reductions in housing allowance and the increasing unemployment all play apart. In February Caroline Lucas tabled a parliamentary question to Employment Minister Chris Grayling asking how many households in the Brighton and Hove local authority area would be be affected by his proposed benefits cap. This revealed that at least an additional 400 households would be at risk adding to the already serious problem in Brighton.
I got a chance to speak to Andy Winter Head of the Brighton Housing Trust about how the emergency services interact with the homeless people of Brighton and what can be achieved when two very different sets of people work together.
andy winter extract on homeless people 1
Featured Image Source : By Klaus Hermsen (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], used with his permission via Wikimedia Commons
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