Charity focusses on UK's hidden homeless

Homeless charity CHAS - (the Catholic Housing Aid Society) has launched its own general election campaign, with the aim of focussing the parties' attention on the growing problem of 'hidden homelessness'. A campaign pack, which has been sent to 5,000 CHAS campaigners and supporters, urges them to seek the views of parliamentary candidates on three areas: the abolition of single room rent; access to housing advice and low demand housing. CHAS director Robina Rafferty said: "The slogan for our campaign is: 'Stop the House from hiding homelessness'. We believe that tackling each of these issues can help prevent hidden homelessness. Many of the people our housing advisors see are not sleeping on the streets but are nonetheless vulnerable and either facing homelessness or are badly housed." "Homelessness and bad housing are unnecessary in a relatively wealthy society such as ours and some of the worst problems are hidden from view. Our campaign is a contribution to highlighting the hidden dimension of this problem. The CHAS General Election briefing pack can be viewed on the CHAS website through our Links pages.