05.08.2021
Our housing and benefits workers focus on prevent of e.g., financial poverty, social exclusion, food poverty and much more and every week see multiple problems experienced by our clients. These include landlord and family disputes, sofa surfing, domestic abuse, ex-offenders, delays in receiving benefits, ill health, bad financial decisions, victims of fraud, unemployment, pension poverty etc. We could certainly do with more staff as our current worker’s’ diaries are always fully booked, and the work requires face-to-face meetings. We are proud that we have been able to engage with 215 clients in the last 12 months. All have avoided homelessness. Now, that is satisfying.
Our very popular and innovative Boost Up Young Homeless project has come to an end of its funding. In the last year this project helped 58 young people under 25yrs of age to find a place to live. Sometimes the cost of keeping a young person off the streets is as little as help with deposit and monthly top ups - totalling in the region of £480 – £600 per person. During the life of the project, we paid the first month’s rent in advance or a deposit to the landlord and topped up Housing Benefit for up to six months by the amount of the gap in benefits and monthly rent. The average cost of keeping each young person off the streets for one year was £2657 pp. of which we had received 55% funding from various funders including Crisis and Homeless Link. The remaining 45% was a cost to us which we fundraised for. All but one of the participants in this project have remained in their tenancy and not needed our support after six months. We are busy writing funding bids in the hope of raising enough funds to run this project again.
We have been helping a number of clients negotiate their way through the EU Resettlement scheme and encouraging engagement and not to be put off by requirement for paperwork and the need to submit digitally. To find an agency that can help key postcode into https://www.gov.uk/help-eu-settlement-scheme. The deadline to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme was 30 June 2021 for most people but a person can still apply if they have ‘reasonable grounds’
No GP – you can still get the Covid Vaccine
Health & Wellbeing Getting a Covid Vaccine if you are not registered with a GP – here’s what the Mayor of London says. We always check that our clients are registered with a GP and if they are not, we help them to register. Being registered with a GP is not a prerequisite of getting the vaccine but it might make it easier to access the vaccine. Brent Council have a selection of pop up centres.