800 homeless people to be employed by housing charities

A London charity and the government have launched a new scheme to get over 800 homeless people jobs with the organisations that help them.

Thames Reach and the department for communities and local government have each put £100,000 into the scheme which will see the charities employing people who have been homeless.

46 biggest homelessness organisations will be approached first to take part and then the scheme will expand to the smaller charities.

The scheme is based on a Thames Reach project to train and employ service users. Now more than 10 per cent of the organisation’s staff have been homeless.

Thames Reach will provide a consultancy service will advise the organisations how to employ homeless people and help them set up training courses in areas such as IT, finance and client counselling.

The scheme was announced alongside the latest homelessness figures which showed the number of people found to be homeless by local authorities dropped 2 per cent in April to June 2007 compared with a year earlier. But the number of homeless people rose 2 per cent in April to June compared with the previous quarter when the figures were seasonally adjusted.

The number of households in temporary accommodation fell for the eleventh consecutive quarter to 74,690 households. The government has to cut the number of households in temporary accommodation to 50,500 by 2010. At it peak, in 2004, there were 101,300 households in temporary accommodation.