This year I’m watching the steady increase in daylight hours with heightened interest, along with the appearance of the blue of iris flowers and the yellow of daffodils in my garden. Often I let these things go by almost un-noticed but if the lockdown has shown me anything, it is the importance of finding the joy in small things. The sound of children in the playground next door is interrupting my concentration as I write this. It’s a tangible sign of this (hopefully final) lockdown beginning to ease and the new normal emerging.
At The Connection, we are preparing ourselves for a post-lockdown world and a very different reality from a year ago. Government statistics from the national annual street count tell us that there has been a 37% reduction in numbers of people sleeping rough. This is in large part a reflection of the initiative to move people into hotels for the first lockdown and subsequent follow up schemes. The very chilly weather in February saw over 200 people placed in hotels. My most recent intelligence is that there are only 60 people sleeping rough in Westminster (a year ago it was about 350).
We are delighted that numbers on the streets are so low but there is still a lot to do. Rough sleeping is the obvious and shocking manifestation of someone’s life going very wrong. Moving into a hotel is a great start – not least the improvement it brings in quality of sleep! However, there is still an awful lot to do to address the underlying causes of someone’s homelessness once they are inside. Our staff are supporting people in hotels to access treatment, healthcare, benefits and longer term accommodation.
The signs of spring ‘21 do, more than in other years perhaps, give us good reason to smile. Alongside the significant reduction in rough sleeping, most of our team have now been vaccinated – having been recognised as frontline social care staff. Our clients have the same priority as care home residents and 44 were vaccinated in our centre last week. So, assuming that we aren’t sent veering off course by a new COVID variant, we might allow ourselves to look forward to an increasingly sunny, social spring and summer as we implement our new service model!
I’d like to thank everyone in the St Martin’s community for your support and encouragement during this incredibly challenging year. It has made a huge difference to us all at The Connection and we really appreciate it.
Pam Orchard
