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The Homeless In Oxford Won’t Need to Go Back to Sleeping Outside, Even if Pandemic Ends This Year
The homeless will not need to return to rough sleeping in Oxford, now that the pandemic has given governments the chance to provide rooms and understanding.
Social & Lifestyle
The Oxford City Council has secured 124 rooms of interim housing for the next year, ensuring there will be no need to return to the streets for former homeless folks that are currently housed in hotels and student blocks.
The council announced last week it had reached an agreement with A2Dominion, which provides student housing, to lease its Canterbury House until July 2021. It has also extended its current lease on the youth hostel run by the nonprofit YHA until the end of March.
In March, the government issued an ‘everyone inside’ direction for local English councils to provide emergency housing for rough sleepers and vulnerable homeless people to prevent the spread of coronavirus—and to date, there have been no confirmed cases of the virus among homeless people in Oxford.
The council has been working closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to deliver interim accommodation and has applied for funding from the £105 million pot unveiled last month.
“The lockdown period gave us a unique opportunity to engage with people in emergency accommodation. For many of them, the certainty of a safe bed gave the bit of stability they needed to start having conversations about leaving the streets behind for good. We’ve already helped 76 people to move on into more sustainable housing, and this is something we want to keep doing,” said Councillor Mike Rowley in a statement on July 30.
Canterbury House and the YHA provide 76 and 42 rooms of self-contained accommodation respectively. A further six rooms are available in a block already leased from University College for people displaying symptoms of coronavirus, which so far, has not been needed.
Interim housing is a bridge between emergency lockdown arrangements and more sustainable housing. The acquisition of Canterbury House and extension of the YHA lease mean the council will be able to maintain accommodation for people housed during lockdown as existing agreements with hotels and colleges come to an end this month.
Tags: Homeless , Oxford, Sleeping, Outside, Communities, Lockdown