Happy ending

YOU may remember the torrential rain which we had on Tuesday, 7th December. I’m sure that most of us who were caught out in it will have run for cover.

A little after 8pm that evening, a group of Lib Dem councillors who were leaving a meeting found a homeless man in wet clothes sitting outside the WBC council offices.

He told us that he had been living in a tent and had been flooded out by the downpour. On a very cold December evening, he had no way of getting dry or finding a safe bed for the night.

We won’t share any details to protect his privacy, but this is a man who has complex needs which were going to make it hard for him to resolve the issue himself, and who was clearly at risk of hypothermia.

It took a team of councillors several hours to get him help. WBC officers and the reception staff went the extra mile to get him into emergency accommodation and we are very grateful to them for working late into the night to do this.

This incident has uncovered some huge gaps in provision for rough sleepers in Wokingham Borough. Even in December, we cannot ensure that there is a bed for the night for someone in an emergency.

Help cannot be provided out of hours unless the rough sleeper has a working mobile phone. In this case, it was only because a group of Liberal Democrat councillors stayed with this man for a couple of hours with their own mobile phones and because of the personal intervention of a WBC director that we were able to get him accommodation.

We need to do far more to ensure that we are caring for Wokingham Borough Council’s most vulnerable residents in an emergency.

The Borough is currently developing an anti-poverty strategy, a necessity that the Lib Dems have been campaigning and insisting on for over a year now.

We need to ensure that this leads to real, tangible action so that issues like this one can be tackled effectively.

No-one in Wokingham should ever again be faced with sleeping outdoors in wet clothes in December.

Cllr Rachel Bishop-Firth