New Outreach to Scots Homeless in London

Tuesday April 1 2014

A charity has set up a new project helping Scottish people who are among the ‘entrenched homeless’ of London.

Borderline, the only charity specifically working with homeless Scots in London, has taken on an outreach worker to engage with around 50 people who have been sleeping rough in the capital for over a decade.

Shona Fleming, Borderline’s operations manager, said the charity acted after finding out Scots accounted for around 12% of homeless people from the UK in the centre of London, and a similar percentage of the 450 people regarded as the most entrenched or hard to move on rough sleepers in the city.

Shona said: “We are hoping, because the worker is specifically for Scottish people, that the homeless clients will identify with that and that’s the unique selling point.

“130 people died on the streets in London last year. It’s shocking, it’s dangerous, and we’re just trying to go as far as we possibly can to engage with them, rather than waiting for them to contact us, because that’s not going to happen.”

The new worker is based at The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a major homelessness project based in the city centre.

The Church of Scotland has a long association with Borderline. Each Moderator of the General Assembly drops in during the visit to London for St Andrew’s Day, and it was one of the charities supported by The Guild from 2006-09.

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