Homeless deserve as much help as Primark

THE recent announcement by the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, David Sterling, regarding the further £1.1m awarded to Belfast city centre to help with the recovery from the Primark fire, highlights the collaborative, speedy approach departments can take in the wake of a crisis.

I welcome and applaud this collaborative style of working, where councils, departments, government and businesses collectively see the role they can play in responding to a crisis. The £5.3m total aimed at bringing people back to the city highlights how costly it can be to respond to a situation.

However, I must ask, where the same level of response and funding from the departments is in the wake of Northern Ireland’s current homelessness crisis?

For a long time, Simon Community NI has lobbied for longer-term, cross-departmental working. It should not take a severe winter, or deaths on the street, for collaboration and reactive funding to materialise.

What should be taken into consideration, when making decisions, is the 20,000 children on housing waiting lists, the 49 adults per day registering as homeless and, most importantly, the three people who, on average, die each week while waiting for a home.

In this year’s Westminster Budget, Northern Ireland was promised additional spending power. Those in charge of the purse-strings should take lessons from their response to the Primark crisis and focus on the needs of our society’s most vulnerable in any decision-making.

JIM DENNISON Chief executive, Simon Community NI