Councils buying homeless one-way train tickets

[Gathursty]

Link - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41501554

Councils buying homeless one-way train tickets
A number of councils in England are regularly buying one-way train tickets for homeless people out of their area, the Victoria Derbyshire show has found.

Some spent more than £1,000 a year on fares and charity Homeless Link called the scale "worrying".

The strategy can be used to reconnect rough sleepers with family, but one man said he was offered a ticket to a city he had never been to before.

The government said it was investing £550 million to tackle homelessness....

Have you seen such people using the train?
How do you feel about councils doing this?

 

[overthewater]

This is nothing new and has been going for years, the main point of this was to allow people to travel back home.

 

[Tetchytyke]

It's been going on for years, it's about encouraging people "home" (as in "get out of our area and stop being our problem"). The definition of "local connection" can be as flexible as you need it to be to get someone to leave.

A standard tool in local authorities' gatekeeping.

 

[AndrewE]

Presumably if these people were put on a bus out of town it would look as though the council were cheapskates...

 

[furnessvale]

Link - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41501554


Have you seen such people using the train?
How do you feel about councils doing this?

How many individuals will £1000 pa actually move, given the cost of one way rail tickets?
Sounds like a non story to me.
Now, if they had been giving out cheap coach tickets, that would be a different matter.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

This is nothing new and has been going for years, the main point of this was to allow people to travel back home.

Yep. Just sounds like there's been a few isolated examples of the policy being misused. With the current Government's approach to tackling poverty it's worth keeping an eye on, but nothing more than that.

 

[341o2]

Indeed, this has been going on for some time in Bournemouth/Poole. The claim is that vagrants are attracted to the warmer climate, in an attempt to "clean up" the town, suggestions have been made regarding playing bagpipe or other music, and offering them free travel back to their town/city of birth - in other words go and be a problem elsewhere

 

[Groningen]

Interesting. As a homeless person you do not want to go to Scotland with the winter coming.

 

[SS4]

This has been going on for a while to encourage homeless people to become another local authority's problem (making the stats look good).