Homelessness charity Caring in Bristol says their services this Christmas will be even busier than last year.
This comes at the end of a year during which the council reported Bristol has the third highest number of people in temporary accommodation of the English core cities.
Caring in Bristol’s ‘Caring at Christmas’ is a first step in tackling homelessness at a particularly difficult time of year.
Their storytelling co-ordinator Alv Hirst has urged the government to play its part in helping those experiencing homelessness.
Mr Hirst has explained why Christmas is a particularly tough period for people they work with.
“Homelessness is a very isolating thing to experience, so if you put that in the context of Christmas you can feel even more isolated.
“It’s also a harsher, more expensive time of year, making it so much more difficult to be experiencing homelessness when all around you seems to be focused on other things.”
Mr Hirst detailed what the shelter does and how much this means to their guests.
“We operate for seven days starting on Christmas Eve, and we open a day centre at the Trinity Centre in Bristol,” he said.
“It enables people experiencing homelessness or precarious housing situations to come, have some festive food, a community to belong to and services which can be fun such as art and craft.
“But we also have some of the essential services they might need over that period, so access to medical support or advice and things that […] at a time when other services might be closed or at reduced capacity.”
The council’s annual 2023/24 wellbeing report found:
- Bristol has the third-highest number of people in temporary accommodation of the English core cities.
- Bristol has ten times the number of households in Emergency Temporary Accommodation than anywhere else in Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire.
- The main cause reported by users of homelessness services is ‘family/friends no longer willing to accommodate.’
- Other significant factors include: ‘loss of assured shorthold tenancy’ and ‘domestic abuse or other violence’.
- Young people and Black African/Caribbean people are disproportionately in need of the city’s homelessness services.
They also described the situation as “a reflection of post-covid household pressures and a lack of available affordable move-on accommodation in the city.”
Mr Hirst concurred that this is the reason for the increased demand for their services.
“This year demand will be higher than last year, I said this at this time last year as well, and it was true then.
“We’re looking at a context of rising costs, particularly in Bristol – we have issues around housing being very expensive and being very scarce.”
He said that the government has already proved it can make a difference and urged them to do more.
“We know that systems, when they change, can have a profound impact,” he said.
“If you think back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we had the ‘Everyone In’ programme which meant that people experiencing street homelessness were able to move off the streets into some safer accommodation.
“It may not have been ideal, but it was a demonstration that with the will, things can change.”
This asks questions of Bristol’s authorities exactly a month after 400 residents were evicted from Barton House and are still living in hotels.
