Rise in number of people homeless in Teesside and North Yorkshire
The latest Government figures are out
There has been a big rise in the number of people who are homeless across Teesside and North Yorkshire.
The latest Government figures from January to March this year show more than 2,000 are affected.
Martin Picken, services manager for DePaul UK in Middlesbrough, said: "I think rough sleeping in itself, people do move from area to area due to a number of factors, so we see a lot of rough sleepers from a different areas sometimes coming to Middlesbrough, that could be because of safety, the threat of violence from where they're from whatever reason, so you do get movements across local authority borders.
"We need more appropriate accommodation for people who are sleeping rough, so an example in Middlesbrough is that we have these hostels that generally there's not a lot of funding around them, so there's not a lot of support in there. The success rate of people going into hostels and being able to move on isn't great at the moment, so we do see a sort of merry-go-round.
"We applied for some funding last year through the Government's Levelling Up and they looked at accommodation which was self-contained, supported accommodation which were dispersed properties in the community. We have 10 people who were sleeping rough in those properties and some have been in for over 12 months now, so that's proven quite successful."
Some local councils say they are offering accommodation but some are rejecting those. Martin added: "Putting somebody into a hostel who's trying to recover and reduce their drug taking down and putting them in that environment where there's other people actively taking drugs can have a negative impact on them, so they may refuse that offer. This comes back to the suitability of the accommodation and it comes back to clients looking for their own accommodation."