Housing Justice Appeals for More Affordable Housing

Alastair Murray, Development Co-ordinator for Christian charity Housing Justice UNLEASH, has called on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to provide more affordable housing.

According to the charity, the number of families living in temporary accommodation has more than doubled, while 500,000 families have no choice but to squeeze into overcrowded housing.

"We would really like to see more reasonably priced rented accommodation for working people," Mr Murray told Christian Today.

"Housing has become such a tool of wealth creation and that is really incompatible with the role of housing to provide for people's short-term and other needs," he said.

Housing Justice was joined by other homeless sector organisations, including Groundswell, the London Housing Foundation and the Christian Alliance Housing Association, at its conference in central London yesterday.

The day-conference was organised to explore new ways of encouraging homeless people to become independent.

In a new style of conference, participants set their own agenda for the day by organising discussion groups around current topical issues in the homeless sector.

In the "Empowering homeless women" group, participants highlighted the guilt and shame that many homeless women feel.

They also identified the need for more gender-specific services, saying that homeless women tended to perceive the current range of services as being male-dominated and threatening. Mixed hostels in particular can house dozens of men yet just three or four women at the same time.

"It's about making them feel good about themselves," said Lilieth Martin from the Christian Alliance Housing Association.

Delegates also complained that an overload of bureaucracy was hampering them in their efforts to serve the homeless.

Mr Murray said it was the responsibility of the churches to signpost homeless people to the wealth of services and resources already available to help them.

He criticised the Government, however, for turning increasingly to a policy of enforcement, whereby homeless people are evicted from certain boroughs or handed ASBOs for misbehaving.

He said this was causing tensions with the many churches that feel "uncomfortable" with enforcement and prefer to adopt the Good Samaritan model of love and kindness to all.

He also warned that there were "definite battles emerging" between local authorities which want homeless people to be streamed through structured services only, and faith groups which offer a wide range of services, like soup runs, that are also designed to cater for those who cannot cope with the structured services.

"There are a lot of people who won't fit into this structured approach and what's going to happen to them? Are they supposed to starve to death on the streets? I wouldn't find that acceptable," he said.

Mr Murray said he wanted to find more areas in which the local authorities and church groups could collaborate.

"I'm trying to create a smarter system because I think churches are good at doing some things and local authority outreach teams are good at doing other things and they should be working more together."