At the time of writing this, we’ve just heard from Chancellor Philip Hammond, within this year’s Autumn budget he’s announced that he wants to introduce a new tax on foreign property buyers, in order to raise money to help people sleeping rough.
Housing Secretary James Brokenshaw has previously vowed to make homelessness a thing of the past and says that the government aims to end rough sleeping by 2027. When all that’s said and done, there are still many people sleeping rough, and Bedfordshire is no exception, with Bedford coming seventh in the UK’s statistics of homeless people.
The latest release shows that in Autumn 2017, there were 4751 people sleeping rough in England, that’s a 15% increase, more than double the number of rough sleepers that we saw in 2010.
Statistics do differ. Charity St Mungos reported figures in the year ending April 2017, showing a total of 8108 people sleeping rough in London alone by outreach workers.
IT’S NOW TIME TO TAKE A REALITY CHECK
It’s obvious that things need to change where the UK’s homelessness infrastructure is concerned. That’s why we’re very happy to support SoupFest. The SoupFest initiative brings together people in Bedford to raise awareness of our homeless. It encourages our community to come together to support them and we invite people to help in any way they can.
The SoupFest team will spend an entire day providing food to people to raise funds that benefit homeless charities.
WE’RE GIVING SOMETHING BACK TO BEDFORD BUT HAVING FUN TOO!
Local choirs and musicians will perform throughout the day, entertaining the SoupFesters (that’s you) and encouraging them to stop, talk, make friends and generally come together.
All this happens on Tuesday 27th November, kicking off at 11.30am and finishing up at 6pm. If you can make it to Harper square and help raise funds, please do so.
You can follow @SoupFestBeds on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, email soupfestbeds@gmail.com for any further information, and head on over to the website soupfest.co.uk to take a look what’s going to be happening throughout the day.