Over 7000 homeless or housing calls to helpline in one year
A housing and homelessness helpline reveals they've taken a call every 34 minutes from the North East, as demand increases by 9% in just one year.
Charity Shelter is appealing for help to fund its free helpline after seeing a surge in demand from the North East, with over 7,000 calls received in the past year alone.
Worryingly, nearly one in six in the North East dealt with by the Shelter helpline in the past year were people who were homeless or within 28 days of losing their home.
Recent figures from the charity revealed that 120 children in the North East will wake up homeless on Christmas morning, so they’re calling on the public to help support its frontline advisers meet the demand.
5% of every sale from M&S’s ‘Food On The Move’ festive range goes directly towards the helpline and funds one in five of the calls it answers. Since the partnership began in 2005, the money raised has helped thousands of families to find and keep a home.
They’re urging people to buy a festive lunch from M&S as an easy way to support Shelter this Christmas and make a difference to struggling families across the country.
Nadeem Khan, a helpline adviser for Shelter, said:
“Every day at Shelter we speak to people faced with losing their home but when a parent calls us, desperate to keep a roof over their child’s head, nothing is more heart-breaking.
“Our team of expert advisers work 365 days a year to make sure that no-one has to fight bad housing or homelessness on their own. If it wasn’t for the money raised by M&S customers, thousands of calls for help from people in the North East would go unanswered.
“That’s why we’re calling on people in the North East to buy their lunch from M&S’s festive ‘food on the move’ range to help raise hundreds of thousands of pounds and together, be there for people who need us. Something as simple as buying a sandwich this Christmas really could be the difference between a family losing their home and keeping it.”
Mike Barry, Director of Plan A at M&S, said:
“This year marks Shelter’s 50th anniversary, but the surge in calls to the helpline, makes it clear that Shelter is as needed now as at any time in its long history. And that’s exactly why our partnership with the charity remains hugely important to M&S and to our customers.”