On the front line of homelessness in Bristol

Homelessness Awareness Week comes to an end on Friday night in Bristol with an annual sleep out at Pip ‘n’ Jay Church.

More than 100 people are expected at the event, which raises funds and highlights the issue of homelessness and the organisations who work to help people who live on the streets

In the final part of Bristol24/7’s series on homelessness in Bristol, Pamela Parkes talks to some of the people who work with those who face eviction or find themselves sleeping rough.

Ines Lag is a volunteer advisor at Citizens Advice

“We see people from different social backgrounds, economic backgrounds and different cultures – there is no one set type of client that we have.

It could be one thing that triggers that potential risk of homelessness – and a lot of people are more prone to that than they realise. One month of wages not being paid – that’s enough for them to fall behind in their rent arrears and, if they are in private accommodation, it can take two months for them to be on the streets. Local authority housing the process can be a little longer, but the process kicks in as soon as you stop paying your rent.

We always say the earlier the better but if you come to us late it doesn’t mean we cannot do anything because we can go to the point when we can suspend warrants of eviction and draft financial statements for clients to take to the court on the day they are due to be evicted.

In Bristol there is a lot of private rented property and rents are quite high for the conditions that clients are living in.

Simply by complaining to your landlord is sufficient for them to serve you with a notice. So trying to assert your rights is sufficient for you to be at risk of homelessness because you were just hoping to get a kitchen that worked properly or better living conditions for your children.

We are seeing more people coming through in terms of debt related causes for homelessness. A lot of clients who are heavily reliant on benefits – they work but their wages are not sufficient for them to pay their essentials.

We assist them with income maximisation – checking they are applying for everything they are entitled to and discussing with them what their lifestyle choices are. It could just be a matter of they are earning far too little to be able to support that lifestyle – or it could just be that the money isn’t enough to pay your rent and your food. 

They are choosing between ‘Should I feed my children or should I pay my rent’. Sometimes they’ll say ‘I’ll feed my children’ and we have to point out that if you feed your children your rent will fall behind in arrears and therefore you will not have the security of tenure you thought you had.

It’s difficult but people come to us because we will tell them simply and factually this is the situation you are in and these are the options that you can take to move forward from the situation.

Nurse Lindsay Popham is a specialist nurse for the homeless for Compass Health

We provide primary health care and support services and the way we work is with an understanding of the issues that homeless people face.

The problem of people being homeless and being able to register with a GP do continue. Most GP practises require you to have an address and photo ID. As you can imagine most of the clients we work with don’t have that.

In Bristol we are lucky enough to have a couple of GP practises centrally that will accept people – Broadmead Medical Centre in town and Lawrence Hill Health centre will do their best to help people who are homeless and Compass Health fills in the gaps.

Homelessness has serious implications for people’s health and their ability to make healthy choices. There is a high incidence of chest related problems, foot problems and mental health is a problem. Homelessness exaggerates any health problems and it reduces peoples ability to access the services that they need and often when people are homeless they are living on the edge – they become very marginalised they become isolated from the normal support systems that other people have.

We have 12-15 doctors and nurses working here and we have opticians and a podiatrist. We try to make services accessible – we work in different places and we go to the hostels. We offer a drop-in service to see our doctors and nurses are always fully booked and people are having to be turned away.

St Mungos in Stokes Croft is the base for the Bristol Outreach Team

We go out four times a week doing a combination of early and late shifts. When we go out early in the morning we go to where people are sleeping rough, we wake them up, tell them who we are and give them a coffee and make sure they know where to come and find us for support

We go out every Friday morning to count how many rough sleepers there are in Bristol. Three years ago there were eight or nine, now there are regularly 25 to 30 people – last Friday we found 41 people which shows how much rough sleeping has increased.

We have a prison outreach worker – anyone who comes out of prison and has nowhere to go will be refereed to us for an assessment. The aim is that when the come out of prison they will go straight into accommodation. Prison is our biggest reason for homelessness at the moment, followed by relationship breakdown.

We wouldn’t turn anyone away but the high support hostels are overrun with numbers at the moment and people are on waiting lists. Over the past few years there has been some closures of high-support hostels  You can’t close a 50 bed high support hostel like Redwood and expect it to be OK – this is the knock on effect of central government cuts.

Citizens Advice Bureau Bristol

Compass Health Bristol

St Mungo’s Bristol

To find out more about the awareness week and the range of services available to help those who find themselves at risk, visit www.bristol.gov.uk/homelessweek

To report someone sleeping rough in Bristol you can use Streetlink. StreetLink is England’s only phone-line, website and mobile app that allows members of the public to send an alert when they see someone sleeping rough and connect them to local services. Call 0300 500 0914 or visit www.streetlink.org.uk