Developers urged to help the homeless

Manchester developers have been urged to give space in their schemes to charities that support homeless people. Paul Morrish, Chief Executive of LandAid, told the Greater Manchester Economic Growth Conference that Greater Manchester is ‘ahead of the game’ thanks to its strategy to tackle tackling rough sleeping: “These are important commitments but nobody can do this on their own including local authorities. Surely you can make one or two units available to local charities to support young people sleeping rough.”

Cuts to public sector budgets mean that the rest of society has to step up to the plate on tackling social ills, said Morrish: “There are only two sources of funding for many of the things that are not statutory responsibilities. We are buggered unless as individuals and businesses, we wise up and engage with things that matter and as businesses we go beyond bake sales and engage with real problems and make a proper difference.”

And the development industry must stop turning a blind eye to the social ills visible outside the conference venue in Manchester city centre, he said: “Our challenge is as a society to be more inclusive. When we look at masterplans or architectural documents we see the world as we want it to be but you just have to walk outside and will see people selling the Big Issue or sleeping in blankets. You won’t see those in the masterplan documents. When we visit the future together, we’ve already started to erase the reality we know is there. When doing place making we have to recognise there is a group of people who are completely absent from our planning. Unless we do that, we are going to end up with rather hollow urban places.”

Mitigating inequalities had to start early in young people’s lives, Morrish said: “One of the harsh realities is that young kids growing up in disadvantaged backgrounds by the age of six will have a third less vocabulary than those from more advantaged backgrounds. Once that divide begins it gets wider and wider.”

Fiona Worrall, Chief Operating Officer for neighbourhoods at Manchester City Council, said that more housing alone would not tackle homelessness: “One of the big challenges is that building isn’t the only solution and isn’t addressing issues of homelessness because there are so many other issues,” she said, giving welfare changes as an example.

“Providing homes is in some ways the easy bit: helping people to build sustainable tenancies is more challenging. If we are going to have real impact on people, we have to get into the things that really impact on peoples’ health. We know there are issues around life style changes, which have a real impact such as whether we walk or cycle or use the car, the communities where people live and how neighbourhoods are designed. The more we can do, the better health outcomes will be in the future. It’s important that health is able to work with us to design what integrated place-based working looks like.”