![]() ![]() National Christian charity Housing Justice suggests around 500 synagogues, mosques and churches served as temporary night shelters over the winter of 2014-15, accommodating over 2,000 people. One recently-completed research project from the Cadbury Centre (‘Megachurches and Social Engagement in London’) showed how Britain’s churches care for the homeless, running winter soup kitchens, providing friendship, medical and personal support, feeding and celebrating with hundreds who would otherwise have been alone and on the streets on Christmas Day, and, increasingly, opening up their buildings to accommodate rough sleepers. Indeed, it was a cluster of Christian and Jewish charities which led the first serious concerted action against homelessness in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in the foundation of the UK housing charity Shelter (1966) and the first ever UK anti homelessness legislation in the form of the 1977 Housing Homeless Persons Act. However, the Christmas story has for centuries motivated the long history of the church’s commitment to helping society’s poor and downcast. Too many people, then, are finding there is no room at the inn for them this Christmas. Little wonder then that the Government’s own figures show the number of rough sleepers in England doubled from 2010-15 to some 3,569. At the same time, hostel beds for single people have fallen by some 10% in the last four years to just 35,000 in England, with around half of homelessness projects seeing a cut in their funding. Sadly, ‘sorry, no room’ it is also likely to be the response that all too many of the UK’s homeless will hear when seeking help from statutory services.Įconomic, social and policy changes have combined since 2010 to reverse previous successes in reducing homelessness, to the extent that 57,750 households were accepted as officially homeless by their local authority in 2015/16, an increase of 6% on the previous year. For Christians, ‘sorry, no room’ is a particularly evocative phrase at this time of year, recalling as it does the story of the first Christmas, replete with popular conceptions of a heavily-pregnant, donkey-riding Mary being dragged through Bethlehem’s back streets by an increasingly desperate Joseph in pursuit of a place to sleep and bear her child.
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