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Cardiff Council took over two large hotels and re-purposed two new shipping container schemes to provide safe and self-contained accommodation for rough sleepers, homeless clients and people living in unsuitable emergency accommodation.

The Council had to rapidly address homelessness in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, protecting rough sleepers, allowing people who were in emergency accommodation to effectively self-isolate and ensuring the safety of frontline staff. As the virus began to spread throughout the community, it became crucial to secure a significant number of additional self-contained accommodation units – to ensure that nobody remained on the street and that individuals were capable of self-isolating if they started showing symptoms. The Council has an in-house hostel team that already managed three hostels in the city and was able to expand very quickly to provide support in the form of additional accommodation in the hotels and shipping containers. Cardiff had also developed a strong multidisciplinary homeless team with social services, health and third sector membership. However, the radically different challenges presented by Covid-19 demanded a fundamental re-evaluation of the partnership’s approach to service provision.

 

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