Homeless families housed at ‘hell-hole’ holiday camp
AWELSH holiday camp has been used to house homeless families during the past year. Pontins in Prestatyn has been used by Denbighshire council because of the lack of any other suitable emergency accommodation.
The news comes as the council is about to adopt a four-year strategy to tackle the problem of homelessness.
The Pontins holiday camp recently made headlines after a family reportedly left after just 17 hours due to what they described as the “horrendous” condition of their accommodation.
In a report to be considered by the council’s cabinet today, Councillor Bobby Feeley, lead member for wellbeing and independence, said that factors such as poverty, poor physical and mental health, substance misuse and addiction, domestic abuse, chaotic lifestyles and offending history are often common in the lives of people threatened with homelessness.
“These issues cannot be addressed effectively by any single agency working on its own,” says the report.
One of the aims is to reduce the use of temporary accommodation including bed and breakfast facilities.
The report states: “We will continue to source more suitable temporary accommodation properties to no longer necessitate the use of bed and breakfast.
“Further work is needed to more fully understand the temporary accommodation requirements and how these are best met.”
A council spokesman said they were not currently using Pontins, but added: “We have used Pontins to accommodate four families this year. The maximum stay was only three days. The reason we used Pontins in August this year was that a number of large families presented to us and we did not have any alternative, suitable emergency accommodation.
“We used the caravans (sic) in Pontins to keep one family accommodated together, rather than booking two rooms and separating the family.
“We also used Pontins as two of the families were single-parent families with four children, so we were unable to book two rooms as with our other emergency accommodation providers, and there were no rooms big enough to accommodate one adult and four children.”