People who feel they may be about to be homeless are being urged to come forward at the earliest possible opportunity as South Holland deals with rising homelessness.
From April to June, South Holland District Council had 107 homeless cases.
It’s set itself a target that 50 per cent of cases are opened before the person becomes homeless and 70 per cent of those result in that not happening.
But from April to June the actual performance was just 16 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
A meeting of the Performance Monitoring Panel heard from the authority’s housing advice officer Gemma Johnson that the team behind it had gone through “a near total loss of permanent members of staff” but a steady team had recovered with six new starters.
“They’ve picked it all up so well and I’m quite proud of the team how far they’ve come in such a short time.
“It’s not going to be a surprise how many issues are affecting homelessness.
“The cost of living crisis is getting worse. In terms of the amount of people approaching us struggling, it’s absolutely huge.
“There’s now a huge focus on prevention. It’s about educating the public and other agencies, approaching partners and private landlords in particular trying to get people to approach us as early as possible so we can work with them earlier.
“Rather than sitting here and waiting for people to come to us, it’s about changing that dynamic and letting people know what we do.
“For example with landlords having problem with a tenant, rather than just serving them notice, come to us, tell us the situation so we can work with them.”
Gemma said the latest data was already showing ‘a positive impact’.
“Housing officers now are not really social workers, but there’s so many people falling between the gaps of services and we are having to absorb an awful lot of that,” she said. “It’s about reaching out to agencies and really figuring out how we can better work out with mental health services which will form an awful lot about how we move forward.”
Coun Bryan Alcock asked Emily Spicer, wellbeing and community leadership for SHDC about money available.
“The budget is very challenged, I can’t deny that” she said. “It’s exceptionally difficult to predict the numbers of people presenting and the numbers that need a B&B.
“Equally we realise the services we use also have costs which are increasing.
“I’ve not got a number for you (in terms of costs), but it’s higher than my budget at the moment.”
