Charities helping homeless into work are laying off own staff

Sunday Herald, The, Nov 2, 2008 by John Bynorth Home Affairs Editor

PROJECTS that aim to help homeless people find work are laying off staff and closing services after a government shake-up of the way in which services are funded.

Eight specialist workers have been made redundant or not been replaced at four groups in Glasgow aimed at helping homeless people gain jobs or voluntary work.

The cutbacks were forced on the charities, which work to break the cycle of homelessness and unemployment, after they lost interim funding from the New Futures scheme run by Glasgow Community Planning Partnership (GCPP) in March. The cuts were due to a re- organisation of "employability services" - the term used to describe helping the homeless into the workplace.

The re-organisation forms part of a series of reforms aimed at reducing unemployment across the UK and meeting the Scottish government's ambition to end homelessness by 2012.

Glasgow was one of 15 deprived areas in the UK to be awarded "pathfinder" status by the Department for Work and Pensions. A new organisation, Glasgow Works, was set up this year to help coordinate the distribution of its share of GBP32 million UK-wide funding from the Deprived Area Fund.

Five organisations have applied to the Scottish government's replacement fund, Fairer Scotland, through the Glasgow Homelessness Network (GHN), but four have been struggling to maintain their services - the announcement on whether they are successful is not due until December.

Two years ago, the network carried out a survey which found that 68per cent of the estimated 10,000 homeless people in Glasgow hope to work in the future, but only 8per cent were working when they were homeless.

One of the organisations, Quarriers, runs a learning development initiative (LDI), based in the city's southside, which serves its Stopover and James Shields homeless projects, aimed at young people aged 16 to 25.

The charity fears its efforts will be severely handicapped by the Scottish government's general move towards outcome-based funding schemes for employability projects. Experts in the field argue that you cannot pin performance targets on the homeless to find work, because they have multiple problems, including addictions and mental health issues, to overcome fi rst.

Quarriers said it will be forced to issue redundancy notices to its four full-time staff at LDI in January and close the project by March unless it can fill the funding shortfall.

Julie Richardson, Quarriers' service manager, said: "The project has continually met and surpassed all its targets and we have invested a great deal in the hope that some future funding package will come to fruition."

The other charities involved in the funding application for employability services are Move On, Blue Triangle Housing Association, Glasgow Simon Community and the Wayside Day Centre. Move On has already halved its four-strong team, forcing it to scrap an arrangement which supported homeless people who attended Stow College.

It helped around 70 people a year, achieving a 50per cent-70per cent success rate in helping people into jobs, volunteering, education or training.

Depute director Jim Burns said: "Homelessness is a cycle which you have to break, but it may take more than six months, even a year, to get work."

The Blue Triangle Housing Association made its three-strong team redundant last month after its funding dried up. However, co- ordinator Patrick McKay is confident of attracting new staff if the application is successful.

Eileen McDade, head of services at Glasgow Simon Community, said its Gorbals-based Buds project, which has helped 80 homeless people into voluntary work or jobs in the past six months, has not replaced three full-time staff who left for other jobs, although it has retained two staff to keep it running.

She added: "You have to ask where the people with those needs fit into a system of strict outcome-based funding.

The worry is they go off the system."

The Wayside Day Centre is more confident. Its spokesman, Martin Johnstone, said: "Our skills service has only two staff which will expand if the consortium's bid is successful."

GCPP said that the organisations were given notice that employability services would be re-developed in an attempt to focus on the causes, rather than consequences of deprivation. Its spokesman added that Quarriers had not taken up its offer of more support for the charities to develop exit strategies or apply for interim funding.

He added: "GCPP needs to ensure that public money is invested prudently to ensure sustainable community regeneration.

"Agencies helping the homeless have been in ongoing dialogue with Glasgow Works programme delivery agents regarding how the particular needs of the homeless can be addressed."

CASE STUDY

Diane Umuhoza was just 15 when she moved to Glasgow after the genocide in Rwanda split up her family and, she suspects, claimed the life of her mother, who "disappeared" after hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered in the war-torn country during the mid-1990s.

Her father had already sought asylum and Diane, her twin brothers Claude and Elie, then 12, enrolled at a school in Clydebank, from where she gained a place at college to study nursing Then, two years ago, their lives were turned upside down again when their father suddenly announced he was moving to London without them. While Claude and Elie were placed in foster care because they were so young, Diane was considered an adult and was made homeless and sent to Inglefield Hostel in Glasgow.