What we do to tackle homelessness

We spend more than £143,000 a year to help provide day services for rough sleepers in Oxford. We fund Homeless Oxfordshire, The Porch day centre and The Gatehouse to provide these services.

Homeless Oxfordshire provides day services from its O'Hanlon House hostel in Luther Street from 10 am to 3 pm on weekdays and from 10 am to 2 pm on weekends. O’Hanlon House provides shower and laundry facilities, and two meals a day. These are available to any verified rough sleeper, regardless of their local connection to Oxford. Users of day services can also access services provided to hostel residents, including training, education and activities as part of the Step Up project.

The Porch day centre in Magdalen Road provides day long support for homeless and vulnerably housed people six days a week. Its services include two cheap hot meals a day, shower and laundry facilities, clothing, and a range of activities including ICT training and allotment work.

The Gatehouse is at 10 Woodstock Road, and provides a drop-in café for homeless and vulnerably housed people six days a week. It also offers free internet access, a clothes store and art, literacy and computer activities groups.

The total provision of day services across the three sites is for 97 hours a week.

In the last few years we have secured additional temporary funding to help people experiencing homelessness from the government’s Rough Sleeper Initiative (RSI) and Rapid Rehousing Pathway (RRP) programmes.

We have won more than £1m in RSI funding for 2018/19 and 2019/20. Last winter this funding allowed us to provide a new multi-agency hub getting people off the streets more quickly and 39 extra beds – these included specialist accommodation for women and two winter night shelters available to anyone experiencing homelessness. This winter, RSI funding will allow us to provide 25 extra beds.

In May 2019 we were awarded more than £850,000 in RRP funding by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). This included £727,400 to transform the former jobcentre in Floyds Row into an assessment hub and shelter for up to 56 people experiencing homelessness or at risk of rough sleeping.

The other RRP funding was given to provide better support for people as they move from the street to long term and sustainable housing:

• £99,000 for navigators working with long term rough sleepers and people who have returned to rough sleeping after being accommodated
• £31,300 for floating support to help people sustain new social tenancies as they leave homelessness behind.

Public Health England also agreed to give us £100,000 to provide alcohol treatment services in the Floyds Row assessment hub.

To allow a full range of services to operate at Floyds Row from next spring, we have agreed to contribute funding to meet the overall project cost of £1.9 million. This is on top of the £1.75m we had budgeted for reducing rough sleeping in 2019/20.

Matilda House

Matilda House is a new supported accommodation service in Cowley providing 22 beds for homeless people with complex needs and move on accommodation for 15 people as they transition towards independent living. A2Dominion run this service, which replaces Simon House and opened in September.

Transforming services

The high number of people arriving on or returning to our streets and the challenges involved in helping them leave homelessness behind mean we are adopting a new approach to rough sleeping in Oxfordshire.

We have recently agreed plans that will mean improved assessment and a range of new accommodation and services aimed at getting people off the streets and into sustainable housing more quickly. This includes providing winterlong emergency shelter available to anyone sleeping rough – whether or not they have a local connection or recourse to public funds.

Councils and health partners across Oxfordshire have committed to working collaboratively to develop a countywide strategy to ensure an effective whole system approach focused on prevention, early intervention and moving people on from rough sleeping. Our plans are part of this transformational approach.

The centrepiece of our transformation plan is the conversion of 1 Floyds Row into a new assessment centre and shelter. When fully operational next spring, Floyds Row will include a range of accommodation, a treatment room and intensive support to help people move on from a life on the streets.

The new approach begins with the first conversation with someone experiencing homelessness. This is often the most challenging conversation and the most important to get right in getting people off the streets for good.

Until now, initial conversations with people sleeping rough have taken place on the streets. Now they will take place indoors in a warm, calm and safe space co-designed by people experiencing homelessness that will be open round the clock all year round. Expert assessment workers will help people to develop personal housing plans and get the support they need from other services to move on into sustainable accommodation.

It can be difficult to engage with long term rough sleepers and those who repeatedly return to the streets because of complex needs that include unmet mental health needs and drug or alcohol misuse. Assessment at Floyds Row will include access to onsite drug, alcohol and medical services.

St Mungo’s is running the new assessment service, and its recent experience of delivering similar “right first time” services in London and the south of England has seen four fifths of people leaving the streets behind for good.

While the conversion of Floyds Row is in progress, interim services including intensive assessment and a winterlong shelter are operating from Simon House.

Our transformation plans to get people off the streets and into sustainable housing more quickly build on the learning from our Oxfordshire Trailblazer project. This was an £890,000 MHCLG-funded programme that ran for two years until September 2019.

The Oxfordshire Trailblazer project worked with health, criminal justice, social care and other services across the county to prevent homelessness by identifying and intervening to help people at risk of homelessness before they reached crisis point:

• community navigators supported their clients to work with services that could help prevent homelessness, and also helped them with issues like benefits, debt, social isolation and finding work
• embedded housing workers helped staff in hospitals, prisons, probation and children’s social care to provide better housing and homelessness prevention support for their own service users
• a homeless champions network provided better communication, sharing of good practice and planning across statutory and other services.

The Oxfordshire Trailblazer project helped to prevent or relieve homelessness in four fifths of referrals where the outcome was known and in around half of cases overall.

From January until the end of March, a group of Oxford churches open their doors to provide emergency accommodation for up to 20 rough sleepers who have been verified by the outreach team (OxSPOT).

For more information about OWNS, visit the OWNS website.

We fund the severe weather emergency protocol (SWEP), which means that local homelessness agencies provide extra beds to rough sleepers during severe winter weather.

SWEP’s primary purpose is to provide emergency shelter during severe winter weather and it is available for any rough sleeper who wants to come inside – even if they would not normally qualify for a bed in our adult homeless pathway or have previously refused offers of accommodation and support.

We activate SWEP on every night that the Met Office forecasts the overnight temperature will drop to zero or below.

We also use our discretion to activate SWEP during other severe weather. This can include snow on the ground, a sub-zero “feels like” forecast or a warmer night during a prolonged freezing spell.

On World Homeless Day 2019 we helped launch Oxfordshire Homeless Movement, a new countywide partnership with the aim of ensuring that nobody should have to sleep outside in Oxfordshire.

Oxfordshire Homeless Movement is focused on filling the critical gaps in provision that other organisations cannot such as:

• Supporting people experiencing homelessness who have lost or don’t have access to state-funded benefits and housing. Oxfordshire Homeless Movement are often a last resort to help them move on from the trauma of homelessness
• Lived Experience Advisory Forum (LEAF) was initiated by Oxfordshire Homeless Movement with the aim to amplify the voices of those with lived experience of homelessness in Oxfordshire so that more informed and effective policies are made at the county level

To give time, things or money please visit the website. It also gives guidance and advice for people who need help. Please keep up to date by following Oxfordshire Homeless Movement on Facebook and Twitter.

We run a scheme that provides anyone experiencing homelessness with up to 6 months of free leisure centre membership. For more information, see the Access to Leisure Centres