Wrexham Council
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Posts
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[quote quote=136738]I agree 100% Bubble. Perhaps they could be moved in with the travellers on Ruthin Road but I suspect that they wouldn’t want to live next door to them either.
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Ha Ha :) Seriously though the fact is the way they are no one wants them in their back yard.
[quote quote=136737] churches opening their doors sounds admirable but would you like to be the caretaker or warden cleaning up the mess each day, and the cost to churches to replace the damage they would inevitably do.
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But churches are supposedly brimming with Christian charity. Maybe they could get volunteers from homeless / drug charities to perform the clean up / repairs of the church after the druggies have spent a night there.
I have no expectation that ‘the church’ will do anything significant (I think one had some sort of coffee and a chat event during the day a few months ago) – only that they COULD do something but choose not to. I have a spare room; I too COULD do something but choose not to – but I am not a church espousing Christian values / charity. The fact is that churches are unused space during the night and churches would clearly rather keep it that way than provide a refuge for people who would otherwise have to sleep outside in all manner of weather conditions.Just to clarify ‘bubble’ the Churches are actively looking at ways of offering support on top of the Feeding the Roofless project that has run for many years- the details below are of an event to be held at the end of the month looking specifically at Night Shelter type activity. I appreciate the issue of everyone can go so far but there does come a threshold when opening your own front door to let a homeless person occupy the ‘spare’ bedroom. This I am sure is one of the dilemma for the Faith Community yet it has worked for many many years in some parts of the country with church crypts being opened up.
Church and Community Night Shelters from
Housing Justice.
Information session
Wednesday 27th September 1.30pm—3.30pm
St. Margaret’s Church & Community Hall
Chester Road
WREXHAM
LL11 2SH
Church and Community night shelters seek to meet the needs of those who are homeless in the coldest months of the year. By working in partnership churches can provide hospitality to those who are homeless, providing
support and understand to help people to rebuild their lives and move away from homelessness.
For more information or to book on this free information session please contact Sarah Wheat—Engagement Officer :
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 01745 532596‘99DylanJones’, don’t you get weary of hearing the same old excuses?
Have you ever noticed how just about any organisation which purports to be dealing with the ‘homeless’ problem in Wrexham (e.g. charities and churches), or any organisation which the public feel should be dealing with it (e.g. council and police), repeatedly claim that they are actively looking at ways of offering support? For example, it’s a complicated problem, these people have complex issues, it won’t be solved overnight, we need to be patient, it’s a small core of troublemakers, they’re looking at how services can be more joined up, and so on. Yet nothing of any real consequence actually happens to remedy the issues. These organisations all just trot out the same excuses – and the church is no different in that regard, yet likes to portray itself as some sort of kind hearted moral authority. The church would be happy for these people to be rehoused, but would not give a moment’s thought for how that would impact the lives of the people they’re rehoused next door to. The church doesn’t want to take them in itself (for understandable reasons), but would quite happily see one of them moved into a home next to mine – or yours.Substance abuse and homelessness are not new issues. And the organisations involved in these issues are not new to dealing with them. They should have foreseen this situation and proactively headed it off instead of waiting for the public to become so outraged at drug abuse in Wrexham that these organisations felt obliged to offer up their platitudes.
Open Minds is a rehab organisation – though they are not a charity and I’ve no idea of their fees. If their own website (http://www.openmindsrehab.com/index.php) is to be believed they have a very high (more than 90%) success rate. They appear to have very reasonable rules – but importantly those rules appear to be rigorously applied. I wonder whether the do-gooders meddling in Wrexham’s ‘homeless’ scene could take on a bit of that approach, without it costing very much. It seems to me that service providers are too keen to excuse the behaviour of their service users and that they are failing to distinguish between sympathising and enabling.
Bubble fully agree with lots you have said–I think the 90% success can be claimed by Open Minds because they are private with quite high fees that do run into £1000’s so generally the people they help are those who have taken a conscious decision that they want to change and have a financial stake.
For many of those who are homeless through substance misuse they are not even at the starting point of wanting to take back control of their lives rather than the substances controlling. You could have the best detox/rehabilitation programme in the world but if the client does not have it in their heart that they want to change the programme will be useless.
I also believe that you are right about being ‘soft’ with some of the people- a good old fashioned ‘talking too’that is persuasive may in some cases be the boot up the backside they need— oh dear I have just made a politically incorrect suggestion.
One of the other issues is that there are too many different agencies all chasing the same clients because they have a financial value
[quote quote=136355]Absolutely spot on Adam. It’s beggar’s belief that the Exec Board leadership have gotten away with pulling the wool over the general public’s eyes for so long. The independents all got voted back in off the back of doing local favours in their respected wards. I learned in this year’s council elections that the very low turnout of people who actually bother to vote, do so on a ticket of who they know in the local area rather than any merits of putting together a stable council to push forward an agenda for the greater good of Wrexham.
The absolute crock I heard about people’s voting intentions were things like: “Ooh well our man standing fixed me mam’s gate last year” or “I knew Councillor T’s Grandad and his family have lived in the area for generations, everyone else on the ballot are outsiders, I won’t be voting for them”.
Because they are independents there is no coherent party-line or coalition line to adhere to governing Wrexham, so literally we have to put up and suffer with Mark Pritchard’s cloak and dagger approach (I really believe he hides in the shadows) of creating an antagonising element in Wrexham that he pushes all the blame and focus on and then whilst the rest of the town rots, all the issues can be blamed on this one thing and the rest of the town’s shortcomings can go jump. Unfortunately the majority of townsfolk who don’t really drill down into the nitty gritty of what’s going on, will see national headlines about druggies and homeless and lay all the blame right there, after tutting about how bad the place they live in has become, but then won’t want to lift a finger or make a call to action to actually do anything.
[/quote]spot on Matt but somehow the myth persists that this current ( and immediately previous ) council are Labour run. Let us be clear – in the space of time May 2012 -September 2014 when it was a Labour run council the focus was on working with partners ( Coleg Cambria) to make use of the site after the Liberal-Independent coalition ( 2005-2012) had sat on it. The gyrations of this council since 2014 are well documented and it is incredible that security is so lax. As I said in the executive board meeting earlier this year ” not that I am advocating it but given the will I could easily access the site and I am 68. Why is there no security?”
New news item re the Groves and what the people there think.. sorry but they wont get sympathy from this item –
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/inside-wrexhams-shanty-town-camp-homeless-ex-offenders/Like it says on the article above, when people are coming out of the new prison, if they have nowhere to go back to, and the council won’t provide them with housing this campsite provides a good place for them to go. Not sure what else people expect them to do
The comments about prisoners being released into the community without housing is not a correct statement.
If someone comes out with a Tag they will be housed during that period.The Prison Service in most cases try and repatriate prisoner back to their respective home town unless there are safety concerns.
Many of the ‘campers’ at the Groves are their through personal choice and actually have accommodation- the choice may change as the weather changes.
Why do people assume that everyone that would be released from Prison is a drug addict and would want to go and live with other addicts in a shanty camp..
The main drug of choice for those at the Groves is Mamba/Spice/Illegal Highs and those on cannabis and heroin/cocaine would not be seen mixing with the “Grovites”. There are some very clear groupings of people in Wrexham amongst drug addicts which is determined partly by what their substance of choice is- this also can determine where and who they hand out with.
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