Planned cuts to shelters in England will cost lives, say homeless people

Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
<span>Garry Stowe: ‘If you don’t have a support network when you are in recovery you are going to fail.’ </span><span>Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian</span>
Garry Stowe: ‘If you don’t have a support network when you are in recovery you are going to fail.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Homeless people struggling with addiction and their mental health have attacked a looming wave of council cuts to hostel services as “plain stupidity” that will cost lives.

A deepening town hall funding crisis is threatening shelters and support workers from Hampshire to Leicestershire, affecting hundreds of homeless people from the start of next month despite rising homelessness.

Charities that help homeless people in Kent are losing £5m a year in county council funding from 1 April as the county faces a £84m budget gap. Leicestershire county council has approved a £300,000 cut affecting a 30-bed supported housing service in Loughborough from the same date. Hampshire county council is proposing a £2m cut next year and Suffolk county council has to make a £1.5m cut starting next month.

Asked what the consequence would be, Garry Stowe, 55, a recovering heroin addict and resident at a Canterbury hostel whose operator, Porchlight, is facing a £1m a year cut, replied: “A needle in the arm; a total collapse of morals; homelessness. If you don’t have a support network when you are in recovery you are going to fail.”

Stowe, who turned to heroin when he was 18 after his partner and infant daughter were killed in a car crash, added: “You can’t do this on your own.”

Stafford Taylor, 32, who is in supported housing in Kent after years of sofa surfing and living in his car, said the cuts “could lead to deaths”.

“People struggling with addiction die out there in the cold,” he said. “I have been suicidal. You feel like nobody gives a shit about you. To have someone to listen can be the difference between life and death.”

County councils say they face a £1.1bn funding gap over the next two years. Because they have no statutory duty to provide homelessness services, many are switching funds to meet soaring adult social care and children’s services costs, which account for three-quarters of some councils’ budgets.

But the cost of allowing someone to remain homeless is more than twice the cost of housing them in supported accommodation, according to research by the National Housing Federation, which said it was “deeply concerned” by the cuts.

Porchlight, which works with more than 9,000 individuals and families every year, said it needed £600,000 a year to keep its hostels open and another £400,000 to fund homelessness prevention work and a helpline. If it can’t find replacement funds, 184 bed spaces are in danger of closing at a time it has 110 people on waiting lists, it said.

In Leicestershire, the county council is also due to stop funding the Falcon Centre, a homeless hostel in Loughborough for about 30 people, at the end of the month to save £300,000 a year.

Hampshire county council is consulting on a £2m cut to homelessness services from April 2025 in partial response to an anticipated £132m budget deficit. Richard Gammage, the chief executive of Two Saints, one of the providers potentially affected, said it would affect 900 people and was “at odds with the surge in rough sleeping within Hampshire, surpassing the national average and up by 26% on the previous year”.

Suffolk county council is due to cut housing-related support to 700 people in a move other councils in the county have warned could have a “catastrophic effect on hundreds of Suffolk’s most vulnerable residents”.

Homeless Link, a membership charity for frontline services, said cuts were “dangerous and shortsighted” and would “make the existing homelessness crisis worse and rapidly prove to be a false economy”.

The County Councils Network said: “Members are under severe financial pressure and still face a £1.1bn funding gap over the next two years, despite planning savings and service reductions of over £1bn … Many have begun cost-saving programmes to ensure they can balance their future budgets, with difficult decisions being made.”

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