Rhys Gwilym-Taylor reports on how Crisis has responded to Coronavirus.
The coronavirus outbreak has been a reminder of just how important it is to have a roof over our heads. The entire public health approach by governments across the world has been based on restricting social contact and self-isolating. Yet too many families and individuals across Great Britain were already without a home, whether sleeping on the streets, in hostels without a plan to move on, or moving between sofas.
The outbreak has piled extra pressure on top of existing issues like housing benefit payments not covering the cost of rents, a shortage of truly affordable housing supply, and a lack of multi-agency support that people need to avoid homelessness.
We have all had to adapt to this quickly changing situation. At Crisis we have been working to adapt our services to meet the needs of our members (clients), working with other organisations across the sector to support and coordinate resources and responses, and working with governments to ensure that everyone has access to the support they need to stay safe.
Our 11 service centres across England, Scotland and Wales have made it a priority to continue to support the needs of Crisis members while also following the latest government advice. Our colleagues have been absolutely determined to provide advice, helping people find somewhere to live and supporting people with their health and wellbeing during this difficult time.
While our sector has risen to meet the challenge together, we’ve been working with governments across Great Britain, making the case for urgent measures to protect people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Along with other organisations we published an open letter to the Prime Minister and the First Ministers of the Scottish and Welsh Governments, setting out the range of measures needed to protect those currently experiencing or at risk of homelessness.
We were pleased that the Welsh Government’s initial reaction met the scale of the challenge, by making substantial funding available to help protect individuals sleeping rough to access self-contained temporary accommodation and providing clarity on removing any barriers to support. Crucially this included people with no recourse to public funds from accessing assistance.
Many households will have faced constant and growing pressures as the outbreak has progressed, pushing them to the brink of homelessness. Those individuals and families needed urgent action from governments to prevent that pressure from tipping them into homelessness. Crisis and others called for immediate and significant additional financial support through the Universal Credit system, including ending the five-week wait for universal credit by making an advanced non repayable grant; a substantial increase in discretionary housing payments for councils; and protecting renters by temporarily suspending evictions.
We also recognised that the outbreak is a challenge that we need to meet together. Homelessness charities have come under immense pressure in recent weeks to speed up the work we were already doing, and re-prioritising in some cases, to make sure everyone has access to the support they need to stay safe and to access self-contained accommodation.
Colleagues at Crisis services work closely with our friends in other organisations on a daily basis. Many of the charities, particularly those who work at a more local level, needed support to continue helping people. With this in mind, Crisis has setup an emergency grants scheme to do this, backed by our own funds and a campaign to make sure we can sustain this help in the coming weeks and months.
Crisis and others continue to call for all governments to go further to ensure people are safely accommodated, that they can keep a roof over their head, and that their health and wellbeing is supported.
It is difficult to predict exactly how the outbreak will progress – but we are determined that ending homelessness is on the agenda of every government in Great Britain as soon as possible. The response to the outbreak shows we can achieve a lot together, whether providing clarity and direction across government departments, working in partnership to re-accommodate people, and showing the flexibility, determination and compassion to help people. It has also shown that we are able to respond to a quickly changing situation to prioritise urgent measures, such as rapidly and safely accommodating people sleeping rough during the outbreak.
When that time comes, we must be ready to make our case again to end homelessness, so everyone in our society has a safe place to call home. In the Welsh Government’s statement on helping people sleeping rough and in inadequate temporary accommodation it reiterated its ambition, in due course, to have a plan to end homelessness in place. With the right policies and approaches in place we can end homelessness so that no one has to face the pressures of homelessness ever again.
Rhys Gwilym-Taylor is senior policy and public affairs officer (Wales) at Crisis