Because its not promoted,? Never heard of it until now

(a) 75% of those rough sleeping have an addiction.
(b) 10% caused by the actions of the criminal justice system.
(c) 5% mental health, those that were previously housed in asylums.
(d) 10% other.

Those rough sleeping by the actions of the criminal justice system, 10%, is where the courts have placed restrictions on an offender. The perpetrators of domestic violence, sex crime, and subject to exclusion notices from areas where they have previously lived. The probation service used to ‘deal’ with instances of housing need, but increasingly due to privatisation, the housing for this type requirement is handled by the private sector. G4S in South Wales and Kaleidoscope have a contract with G4S for the provision of ‘out-of-area’ housing. Essentially, there is a process of importing undesirable criminals into Wales.

Those rough sleeping with evident mental health issues, 5%, would many years ago, be housed in ‘asylums’. This provision was ended with the introduction of ‘care-in-the-community’, however, the NHS, more particularly in England have ended their spending mental health provision. Patients fail to take their medication, end up on the streets, and go through a revolving door of sectioning.

There are two schools of thought on tackling rough sleeping (75%) by those with addictions.

(1) Treatment First.
The argument goes that it’s pointless providing rented accommodation to anyone addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling as the problem will re-occur as the person will spend their benefits on the addiction rather than paying for their housing. Most addiction interventions involve prevention from harm (like needle exchanges) and substitution intervention (like Methadone). This method of alleviation has a very poor success rate due to the chaotic life of the rough sleeper, access to cheap alcohol, a criminal market in the substitutes, and easy access to weed. In Wales, Drug Aid gets Welsh Government grants to provide these services and by it’s nature, it attracts addicts into Wales from across the border.

(2) Housing First.
The argument goes is that if housing is provided directly to addicts, a lifestyle stability can be established and subsequent medical provision can tackle the cause of the homelessness. It was pioneered in the US by the Mormons (charity sector God squad) with little success, and became known as State funding of the crack houses and drinking dens of Salt Lake City. Housing First was more successful in Scandinavia, most notable in Uppsala in Sweden, but the key to the success was a good state funded social services and health provision. Housing addicts became ‘clean’ as a result of providing housing first, and subsequently backed up by treatment.

Housing First is the reasoning behined the Kaleidoscope Project, to import addicted rough sleepers into the to poor areas of Wales (they have just obtained a huge ‘rough sleeping grant’ from the DCLG in England) with the Welsh Government providing the homes (via Housing Associations) and the NHS in Wales paying for the subsequent treatment.

So how do we stop this?
So what provision (if any) should be made?

Thank you dafis, here is the direct link to the petition to sign.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/166711

Nearly 2 million people have signed the trump petition, so why on earth haven’t more people signed the petition for ‘April’s Law’ to help protect our children? Sentences for sex offenders should be far tougher, so a clear message is sent that child sexual abuse is in no way tolerated in our society. Gone should be the days of brushing CSA under the carpet as taboo. It is the worst nightmare of any family, what April and her family were put through and we should all support this vital petition to help better protect all our children.

He should be able to rejoin us soon.

Did you request an internal review? There is a process to allow that if you don’t get a proper reply or the reply is delayed. By law a FoI request must be responded to within 20 days – unless a valid reason is given for any delays.

Help on how to use FOI successfully is much appreciated I’ve been told how they are worded can be crucial also.
I’ve used them in the past with zero success.
eg After a 10 month wait all I was only allowed was some newspaper clippings about the issue I requested.
“cai maes sais”!

@ dafis
“…laying out the entire negotiating strategy, goals objectives etc is about as naïve…”
How the UK government is going to negotiate is something that needs to be kept under wraps.
The problem is that the goals and objectives have been declared publicly – to get the best deal for Britain. Which tells us nothing specific about what Britain will actually get nor does it acknowledge the reality, which is that whatever it gets will be no more than what the EU is willing to agree to.

The UK government knows that the deal that it eventually gets for Britain will be not be what the bulk of the electorate, both remainers and leavers, will think of as being “Best” . It’s strategy and that of all the newspapers that supported Brexit will be to blame Johnny Foreigner for being nasty to Britain.

There’s effectively an unspoken policy being carried out by the government, helped by the Labour party to cultivate the delusion within Britain that Britain is a more significant, influential and powerful nation than it is .So far that “policy” appears to be having success. Up as far north as the Cheviot hills anyway.

Most of the people – especially the ones that blindly go along with the mainstream propaganda – haven’t got a clue what’s going on behind the scenes. However it’s heartening to see some are at last waking up!

Click HERE.

Well done for updating.
Not so much that Auntie’s story was factually wrong, it simply didn’t give the whole story and in consequence was somewhat misleading as to the role played by the Chief Exec. Heaven only knows why it took them so long to publish a correction which is slightly misleading in itself … but it seems to have been made not long after Jack retired last year having reached his 60th, so a plausible hypothesis would be that once a private citizen he may have requested it himself.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you daffy2012, unfortunately I’ve been out of circulation for a couple of days.

Setting up a FoI site is not that difficult from a technical point of view. What such a web-site requires to be efficient and practical is a comprehensive database. It’s not a huge task in Cymru because we only have 22 major authorities. Each authority has a network of parish/ town/ community councils. What we would need to do is collect all the FoI e-mail addresses used by the main 22 authorities (just one for each. Click HERE for a list). Then we need the e-mail addresses for the person dealing with the smaller parish/community councils (usually the clerk for the council for each). Not all smaller councils publish e-mail contact addresses, but they can probably provide an address if asked. Then there’s the Senedd, NHS, Police & education authorities etc. along with any other public body that comes under the provision of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

It would be a bit of a task to collect all these for one person, but if we got a team together it would be quite easy to do. The best way forward would probably be for each volunteer to be tasked with the job in their own authority area. All that’s required is the official name of the council and an e-mail address.

Can I suggest that any of our contributors, that fancy lending a hand in this voluntary task, can contact Jac, using the contact mail form in the right hand side panel of this page.

In answer to your last question, some have shown an interest but we haven’t had any volunteers put their name forward yet.