London buses turned into mobile refuges for people sleeping rough this winter

Two revamped London buses will patrol the streets of London this winter to offer mobile care centres to people living on the streets.

The ‘one-stop’ mobile units will offer homeless people medical help, haircuts, showers and advice to help them find accommodation.

They’ll be sent around the capital to help its population of more than 3,000 rough sleepers rebuild their lives.

It is also hoped that the Change Please buses will be able to start offering coronavirus vaccinations from early 2022.

The first-of-its-kind project aims to help homeless people find their feet and ‘remember the person that they used to be’.

It was founded by Cemal Ezel, a 37-year old former City banker from Peckham, who also opened a coffee shop which trains rough sleepers how to be baristas. 

He said: ‘The long-term goal is really to try and break down those barriers for somebody to then exit homelessness longer term.

‘From the people that we interact with on a daily basis, a lot of people say to us that they’ve become too embarrassed about looking at their reflection in a shop window when they walk past a shop window, which is hundreds of times a day if they’re rough sleeping.

‘And by providing somebody with a haircut, a shower, a change of clothes, and then they leave with a Polaroid picture of themselves, hopefully they start to remember the person that they used to be and the image of the person that they used to be, which is for us that building block back into them rebuilding their confidence and their self-belief, again to try to have that end goal of them reintegrating back into society and leaving long-term homelessness.’

The buses will run six days a week over the next two years, with each bus supporting a minimum of six people a day and costing £22,000 a month to run.

Rough sleepers will be able to send a text to request a bus comes to them so they can access healthcare.

The project was officially opened by London mayor Sadiq Khan and NHS England is providing GPs one day a week as part of a pilot scheme.

Mr Ezel added: ‘Someone might be sitting there with a tumour, or growth somewhere, or a black toe, or persistent cough, or a pain in their arm or something like that, and their level of confidence, self-esteem, self-belief, self-worth is so low that actually they just put it to one side.’

 .

 .