Bristol City Council will use £1million of government funding to run two year-round shelters in the city.
The authority received £2.8 million in total to support homeless people in Bristol.
The city is one of around 270 areas that will share £112 million to enhance the services available to people living on the streets and help them into accommodation.
Around one third of the funding (£1m) will be used to run two year-round shelters.
The council has said one of these could be St Anne’s House in Brislington which is currently used as a winter shelter and provides 30 emergency beds between October and March only.
It was announced last week that the council is looking at turning the building into affordable housing, but that it could be used as a year round shelter while the proposals go through the planning process.
The two year-round shelters would provide basic shelter accommodation and access to multi-agency drop in facilities, as well as food provision and activities.
The money will also be used to provide:
- A specialist mental health nurse to work within the Outreach team.
- Two new additional posts in the Outreach team.
- Increased capacity for the Somewhere Safe to Stay programme and Supported Lettings team.
- Temporary accommodation with additional health support for people leaving hospital.
- New specialist ‘navigators’ who work to help people with a variety of support needs into accommodation and enable them to access other services.
The Rough Sleeping Initiative was launched in 2018 to ensure local areas were given the boost they needed to provide these vital services for those living on the streets. At the time Bristol City Council was awarded £600,000 which was used to set up St Anne’s Shelter.
It also funded a multi-agency move-on team to work with people to help them to move in to longer term accommodation and a programme to work with prison leavers to prevent them from ending up on the street.
Last year a further £500,000 enabled these services to keep running for another year. Funding from this year’s bid will also allow this support to continue.
Councillor Paul Smith, cabinet member for housing, said: “We are working with a range of partners to tackle homelessness in the city, but unfortunately the number of people sleeping rough experiencing homelessness continues to rise across the country.
“We remain committed to doing everything we can to eradicate homelessness and additional shelter space will allow us to spend more time working with vulnerable people to find them a route off the streets.
“We are already running a number of initiatives to reduce rough sleeping and wider homelessness in the city, but we hope these additional resources can help us make a significant reduction in the number of people forced to live on the streets.
“Ultimately we know that the only way to truly end homelessness is provide enough affordable housing and make the welfare system work better for people who are homeless, but these additional services will allow us to make a real difference while we work towards our long term goals.”
