Homelessness is on the Rise!
Project Antifreeze have been working together with various local agencies and politicians to get a change to the way the annual head count is done. This is to establish how many rough sleepers there are in the city of Brighton & Hove. Many of our supports may remember one of the speeches on the opening day of the new premises where it was claimed Brighton only had 10 rough sleepers! Since then, there has been a significant change of local government policy regarding the way in which they conduct the rough sleepers head count. The new policy involves the collaboration of local homeless agencies. With the agencies sharing their statistics of who they work with on a daily basis and comparing the names and numbers with other agencies a far more realistic figure can be obtained.
Here at Project Antifreeze we had the privilege of being part of this first run of the new head count. We are pleased to announce that the outcome has produced a far more realistic number of rough sleepers. Is official overall figure is 117 known rough sleepers, 74 of which have been found at their sleeping site and 43 that have been understandably more secretive with the location in which they sleep. This exercise has been very useful to be part of and has shown some interesting facts about the levels of homelessness. For example, 83% of clients at Antifreeze are male and 17% female. With regards to the nationality of out clients we have seen that 53% were British, 10% eastern European, 9% other European countries with the other 28% being a combination of various ethnic minorities.
From the clients perceived needs in priority was:
1.) Housing
2.) Dealing with alcohol addiction
3.) Employment & Training
The big questions for us to ask, now we have a truthful figure is:
How can we best continue to help these 117 known rough sleepers?
