Rough Sleeper Outreach

The Outreach Team provides individuals with an excellent service, enabling people to leave the street and take their first steps towards a lasting, genuine independence.

SPEAR has now been co-ordinating a rough sleeper outreach service in South West London for many years. In 2017, SPEAR was commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to coordinate a rough sleeper outreach team working across four boroughs – Richmond, Sutton, Kingston and Wandsworth.

Our team go out late at night and in the early hours of the morning to identify those who find themselves rough sleeping with the objective of helping sign-post those rough sleepers to relevant services and engage them into SPEAR’s further services. Engaging them into SPEAR’s services requires *verifying their local connection with a view to accommodate them.

*Verify means a team will come and find you in a rough sleeping location. SPEAR’s staff team will do an eligibility assessment to see if you meet the criteria for our services. Clients we work with will then be added to a database of rough sleepers called CHAIN.

Rough Sleeper Helpline (020 8404 1481)

How SPEAR responds to you reporting a rough sleeper.

Your reporting will go straight to our Outreach team. However, please note that our Outreach team are not a 24/7 emergency service. Whilst some of their shifts to verify rough sleepers happen at night time or the early hours of the morning, staff can only respond to reporting during the office hours of 9am – 5pm.

If possible, we ask you to refrain from reporting rough sleepers through SPEAR’s social media. Our social media account is co-ordinated by our fundraising team who are not able to respond individually to your query and will just pass it on to our outreach team. In addition, due to client confidentiality we cannot in any way feedback on a social platform.

Due to client confidentiality, SPEAR’s outreach team are not able to discuss individual clients. We appreciate this can be frustrating if you have seen a rough sleeper on a number of occasions. But please do understand that in some cases we are aware of the rough sleeper and help has been offered. However, due to the complexity of individual situations, it can take time, patience and trust for an individual to engage fully with SPEAR. Or circumstances can mean there is a delay in engaging them with SPEAR’s services.

You can also email any questions to outreach@spearlondon.org 

THANK YOU for helping us to help those most vulnerable in our society, sleeping rough on our streets.