Delays to new hostels added to homelessness crisis, council told
Man died after sleeping in a bin shed
Tuesday, 28th January — By Richard Osley
The bin shed in Hampstead where a man was found dead earlier this month
WATCH OUR HISTORY CHANNEL, UNTOLD LONDON, ON YOUTUBE
CAMDEN’S homelessness crisis was made worse by the Town Hall’s failure to get new hostel places available on time, it was claimed this week.
The New Journal reported last weekhow a man sleeping rough in a bin shed on the South End Close estate in Hampstead had been found “frozen” to death.
The man’s identity has yet to be confirmed although council officers believe they know who it might be.
At least nine people are recorded to have died while on the streets last year in Camden and the council’s graphs show cases of homelessness are increasing.
SEE ALSO MAN DIES AFTER SPENDING FROZEN IGHTS SLEEPING IN A BIN SHED
The council has previously celebrated its plans for 89 new hostel places at development sites in Chester Road, Highgate, and Camden Road, Camden Town but Monday’s full council meeting was told how the projects had overrun and would not be ready this year.
Liberal Democrat leader Councillor Tom Simon said: “Those two hostels, as agreed at a cabinet meeting in July 2020, were described as urgent with a target date for completion of 2022.
“The new target date is late summer 2026 – a four year delay in that urgent project. I hope that there are no further delays. “If you look at the cost of homelessness in Camden, you’ll see the overspend projected for this year is over £13 million and it has been skyrocketing every year. It’s important to remember that the most expensive parts are placements in hotels and bed and breakfasts.
“If those 89 units had been ready on time, that would have been four years of people not needing to be placed in hotels and instead placed in purpose-built, brand new hostels.
“There’s also the human cost. Some of them have been placed in hotels for weeks or months on end: you often get two weeks in one place out of the borough, and then sent off at the last minute to another place with very little security, very little certainty. Nobody can rebuild their lives in that situation.”
He added that the figure of nine deaths last year was a minimum because the deaths of people in hostels were not included.
Council leader Richard Olszewski speaking at last week’s meeting
Labour councillor Richard Olszewski, the leader of the council, said: “I too am disappointed that we’re only able to cut the turf, so to speak, on them now. We all wanted them earlier.”
But he added: “In castigating us, for delay – he’s (Cllr Simon) forgetting the fact that we had a bit of an interruption called Covid. That affected everything both in the ability of businesses to get going in construction again, let alone its financial impact on the council.
“Not just in terms of our revenue, but the inflation that we subsequently faced which undermined the financing, and everything else we were trying to do. So it’s important to bear in mind context rather than going for cheap jibes about things not happening.”
He said the new Labour government had this week trebled an emergency rough sleeping fund, and that urgent help had been sent out in January when the severe weather event protocol – known as SWEP – was activated. Cllr Olszewski said
Camden had “seen a 51 per cent increase in numbers sleeping rough”, telling the meeting that the council was working hard to tackle the process and was receiving £5.2million in a “homelessness prevention grant” to use.
