YORK Central MP Rachael Maskell has repeated calls for the city council to review its decision to end funding for the Salvation Army’s early intervention rough sleeping team, after it emerged NO rough sleepers were consulted over the plan.
As reported in The Press last month, the city council’s £95,000-a year of funding for the Salvation Army programme – which sees members of the charity’s early intervention team out at 5am five days a week, checking on people sleeping rough to ensure they’re OK, and to direct them towards help or a hot meal - will cease at the end of this month, after a one-month ‘transition’ period.
The council says it will be expanding its own rough sleepers service under a new homelessness strategy, with the help of an extra £260,000 of government funding over the next two years, and wants to avoid duplication.
The authority aims to expand its own team of rough sleeping ‘navigators’ who, like the Salvation Army team, do early morning checks (though only for one morning a week) but are also out and about at other times of day and follow rough sleepers through a programme of interventions designed to get them off the street.
The council is also to start its own drop-in service for rough sleepers, five mornings a week at the Peasholme Centre hostel on Fishergate – the Salvation Army already offers a drop-in.
The council will also use the new government funding to expand its ‘housing first’ programme, under which rough sleepers are given help to find permanent housing and then ‘wraparound’ support to ensure they are able to stay in their new homes.
The authority insists the new rough sleeping strategy is designed to ‘provide the right support at the right pace for those that need it’.
But quizzed by The Press about whether any rough sleepers themselves had been consulted about whether the Salvation Army funding should be ended, the authority admitted that they had not.
A council spokesperson said: “The council is already working with rough sleepers through its street navigators. Were it planning to entirely remove support, it would consult but as it has more than replaced the service that was provided, this was not recommended.”
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It has also emerged, again in response to a question from The Press, that none of the people who made the decision to end funding for the Salvation Army programme had actually been out at 5am with the charity’s early intervention team to see what work they did.
Council decision makers were ‘well aware’ of the ‘good work (the) Salvation Army has done with rough sleepers in the city over a long period’, the spokesperson said.
But they added: ‘Street navigators already work with rough sleepers to develop a great relationships which lead to positive outcomes in helping them off, and keeping them off, the street, which is our main objective.”
The revelations today prompted York Central MP Rachael Maskell to call for a delay in ending the Salvation Army funding, so that rough sleepers could be properly consulted.
Failure to consult, she said, was an example of the way that rough sleepers and homeless people were too often ignored. “They have no voice,” she said. “It dehumanises individuals.”
Ms Maskell said the council had already extended the Salvation Army funding for one month - to the end of October – to allow for a ‘transition period’.
So there was no reason it could not extend the funding for a further period to allow for a ‘proper consultation with people with lived experience of homelessness and being on the streets’, she said.
She added that bringing the entire rough-sleeping service in-house as a council-only operation was anyway a bad idea.
Local authorities needed to be challenged in the way they did things, otherwise they developed a ‘closed culture’, she said.
The Salvation Army and other charities like it were ‘nationally renowned’ for the way they worked with rough sleepers.
And, being independent of local authority, rough sleepers were more likely to trust them and engage with them, she said.
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