Wychavon District Council has invested £660,000 for supported housing accommodation in partnership with St Basil’s
A new scheme has been launched in Evesham to support young people threatened with homelessness.
Wychavon District Council has invested £660,000 in creating the supported housing accommodation at Merstow Place in partnership with youth homelessness charity St Basil’s.
This comes after the council prevented 30 young people from becoming homeless in the first three months of this year.
The scheme will provide eight rooms with shared facilities for 16 to 25-year-olds.
There will also be two self-contained flats, which will be used as training flats to give young people experience of independent living, before they move on to suitable accommodation.
St Basils will manage the scheme, which will provide a supported home environment for young people to thrive with support and training around things like budgeting, independent living skills, education and employment.
The aim is to enable young people to access and maintain their own accommodation in the future and prevent them from developing more complex needs which may be more difficult to solve and could ultimately lead to them sleeping rough.
Young people moving into the scheme will have a local connection to Wychavon district and will have approached its housing service for help.
Wychavon’s housing service will monitor the success of the project and it is expected most young people will stay between 8 to 12 months before moving on.
Cllr Chris Day, executive board member for housing, health and wellbeing, said: We’re delighted to be partnering with St Basils to deliver this scheme. It’s the first time we have done anything like this, and we’re excited to get started.
Ben Taylor, director of housing for St Basils, said: The complexity of the challenges young people experience when at risk of homelessness can’t be resolved by one organisation alone.
