Homelessness Support at the Foxton Centre

Foxton Centre work especially with the City's street sleepers

The Foxton Centre work with rough sleepers who find themselves at the margins of society and often experiencing issues of addiction, poverty and mental health.

Through the Foxton Centres outreach work they engage with street sleepers on a weekly basis and encourage the use of support services.

Assertive Outreach

On a weekly basis, a team of community social workers, student social workers and volunteers who have personal experience of homelessness, take to the streets of Preston in the afternoon (usually between 4pm and 6pm) to make contact with people sleeping rough.

The aims of the outreach are to assess and monitor patterns and levels of people sleeping rough in Preston and to promote and encourage the engagement of rough sleepers with support services.

The route taken during outreach sessions is developed from intelligence from past and current rough sleepers. The Foxton team do not wake those who are sleeping, but return to them with a hot drink and food.

The majority of new contacts follow on to access support from community social workers at the Community Cafe and Day Centre in the Foxton Centre, where people can get a hot meal, shower, get warm and get help and access to resources.

Housing First Preston

The Foxton Centre was one of the first organisations to adopted a Housing First approach to help meet the needs of the homeless in the city.

The service has been developed over the last two years, working closely with Preston City Council and MITEC, a property management company.

Housing First is designed to provide open-ended support to long-term and recurrently homeless people who have high support needs. Unlike many homelessness services, Housing First provides long term support to people with on-going needs.

People using Housing First services are much more likely to have severe mental illness, poor physical health, long-term limiting illness, physical disabilities and learning difficulties than the general population.

They are often highly socially marginalised, stigmatised and lack social supports and community integration. They are likely to be economically inactive and to have histories of contact with the criminal justice system. Rates of problematic drug and alcohol use are also high.

Housing First - a client led approach

The Foxton Centre use a client led approach so that people using Housing First services exercise choice and have control over their own lives. Housing and support are also separated, i.e. getting access to housing and remaining in housing is not conditional on accepting support or treatment. Service users are also not expected to stop drinking or using drugs in return for accessing or remaining in housing.

Housing is also provided immediately, or very rapidly, and there is no requirement for service users to be trained to be 'housing ready' before they are offered a home.

The Rough Sleepers Initiative - (RSI)

The Rough Sleepers initiative (RSI) has helped provide services for people sleeping rough in our city.

Funding is provided by the Department of Levelling Up Housing and Communities to Preston City council who fund the partners in the RSI.

Elements of the RSI are:

• Street outreach work contacting people out on the streets
• Day Centre provision at the Foxton Centre on Knowsley Street
• Emergency accommodation with self contained en-suite rooms
• Move on accommodation in a variety of settings in Housing First properties, in move on flats provided by Community Gateway, Calico, Onward and Progress Housing Associations.

The idea is that people can move from the streets to a more settled and safe life and that crucially on that journey they do not fail. Things may go wrong and new options may need to be investigated but all partners have agreed not to give up and will keep trying to help each rough sleeper.

In the past 18 months we have all faced a major challenge during the year as along with everyone else we began to experience the Covid-19 pandemic. In an attempt to address the public health risks associated with rough sleeping with the government adopting an "Everybody In" approach across the country which meant that due to covid risks everyone was to be brought in from the streets.

This initiative was successful in Preston bringing most rough sleepers into emergency accommodation and hotels. It was a major upheaval for the Foxton Centre as it meant the closure of The Foxton Centre's emergency homeless hub due to the shared nature of the accommodation. This catered for 6-8 people at any one time, with the Foxton Centre having a situation where they had to support over 30 people in emergency accommodation.

Initially accommodation was provided in hotels which had Covid safe en-suite rooms, and staff travelled to deliver support including provision of food as no catering facilities were available on site.

The staff and our supporters in the local community were heroic in helping deliver a comprehensive service to these rough sleepers in very difficult circumstances. Later in the year The Foxton Centre secured some former student accommodation which was not in use and provided catering facilities which was much more suitable as an accommodation service.

The Foxton Centre accommodate over 107 people each night across Preston. Although this client group brings many challenges The Foxton Centre is committed to work in partnership and continually evolve the service to meet the users needs. 

In the year April 2020 to February 2021, The Foxton Centre will have supported over 235 individuals by providing accommodation across their sites and provided 33,668 bed nights through the year.