People still sleeping rough on Lord Street in Southport

People are still sleeping rough on the streets of Southport in 2022. This man was in the doorway of Starbucks on Lord Street in Southport early this morning.

Sefton Council has a strategy for dealing with homeless people.

The Homelessness Act 2002, requires every Local Authority to carry out a homelessness review in its Borough every 5 years, to develop and publish a Homelessness Strategy based on this review and to consult with other statutory and voluntary organisations. To undertake this review and develop a subsequent strategy the Council appointed Neil Morland Housing Consultants LTD. The scope of this commission included a comprehensive review of current and projected levels of homelessness in the Borough and a review of current homelessness services.

The Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy is comprised of three documents:

• The formal Homelessness Review identified the evidence of needs, and engagement with stakeholders, service providers and service users, in order to collect evidence and opinion of what works well now, what doesn’t work well, and what gaps in services there may be.
•  This evidential review was then analysed and interpreted to produce the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy 2018 - 2023.
• Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Plan. This plan will guide future delivery of the strategy and allow progress to be monitored. This document has been developed largely in response to the many recommendations made in the Homelessness Strategy.

An Equality Impact Assessment was carried out on the strategy. This can be viewed here.

Annual Report on Levels of Homelessness in Sefton 2018/19

Sefton’s Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Strategy 2018-23 contains an action to, ‘Publish an annual report explaining the current levels of homelessness, to aid elected councillor and chief officer decision making, and carry out an in-depth analysis of data collected by the Homelessness Case Level Information Classification monitoring system (H-CLIC).’

Producing an annual report gives Sefton a snapshot of all types of homelessness across the borough. Over time this will allow Sefton to benchmark where we are compared to previous years and will also enable us to help plan services for future years.