9:29am Wednesday 1st April 2009
Exclusive By Leigh Marles, Editor
FEARS are growing that Wirral families unable to cope with the credit crunch will soon be facing the nightmare of being rendered homeless.
Wirral’s Citizen’s Advice Bureau report a huge increase in people seeking their help with mortgage arrears.
Now a call has been made to bring the council’s 2,000 empty properties back into use to provide emergency housing for those in need. Wirral CAB itself is beginning to feel the strain as advice workers and volunteers struggle to cope with the increased workload.
CAB chief executive Mike Eden told the Globe his officers are being “overwhelmed” with calls for help.
He said: “There has been a significant increase in the number of debt enquiries highlighted by the increased waiting list for appointments with our debt specialists.
“Housing enquiries have increased significantly since October, 2008, and this is reflected by the increase of our shared court services and legal services commission funding for this area of work.
“There has been no evidence of the number of homeless people increasing – but there are growing numbers of people with mortgage arrears.
“The reality is that if we could attract more funding to pay the salaries of specialist debt workers we could deal with more clients’ financial difficulties.”
Mr Eden added: “All the Wirral CAB advice centres are busier than ever and even with increased volunteer numbers we are still overwhelmed by client enquiries for assistance.”
He said that in the next few weeks, the agency will be improving accessibility to advice services through evening and weekend working from three advice centres in order to deal with the continued demand.
A recent report by the local authority’s housing unit to the housing and community safety committee showed that there were only there people officially registered as “sleeping rough” in the borough.
It stressed that the council is working with other groups such as the YMCA and Wirral’s homeless project The Ark to ensure everything is being done to ease the plight of those facing life on the streets.
It noted that the government has set the council a target to reduce the number of rough sleepers to zero by 2012.
However, committee member Cllr Leah Fraser has disputed the criteria for classing people as officially homeless.
And she demanded empty council properties be made available to those in need.
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