PROJECTS to help people sleeping rough in York to settle in "normal" housing have received a £240,000 boost, the Government announced today (Tue).

The cash builds on the previous success of schemes which have slashed the number of people actually sleeping on the city's streets.

Lesley Healey, head of advice and housing assessments for City of York Council, which will co-ordinate the distribution of the funding, said she was thrilled to have it and proud of what had been achieved locally.

"It's a real compliment to the agencies that have been working together here," she said.

She explained £90,000 would be spent over three years on a project which included employing a mental health nurse to help rough sleepers.

A further £150,000 would be spent during the next 20 months on supporting people with a history of rough sleeping who were moving into tenancies, and on drug outreach work.

The aim of the funding was to tackle the longer term problems which made people prone to sleeping rough rather than simply getting them off the streets.

"The whole point of these three projects is to achieve positive change for people so they can enter a more normal part of society," she added.

The announcement of the cash boost came from the Government's Rough Sleepers Unit, which said the number of rough sleepers in York had fallen from 18 last year to two, while the number in England as a whole had fallen to just over a thousand.

Lesley said it was true that one recent count had been as low as two, but the numbers varied.

She said Louise Casey, head of the Rough Sleepers Unit, had complimented the work being done in York on a visit to the city last month (July).

The principle behind the new cash funding was backed by Jeremy Jones of the York Arclight Project, which has a centre for rough sleepers in Leeman Road.

He said they had separate Government funding to help them provide accommodation to keep people off the streets.

But he was concerned about what would happen after 2002, when the Government hoped to have cut the number of rough sleepers by two thirds, because he feared Ministers might feel the problem was solved although longer term issues still had to be addressed.