Sheffield City Council: Open Empty Buildings as Winter Shelters

Thank you to everybody who signed this. It's still picking up signatures slowly, but "somewhere between five and six thousand" is clearly as good as it's going to get, so I'm going to hand it over to the City Council in the next couple of days. The Council have made it clear that they believe the provision that's already in place is sufficient, and that the kind of approach suggested by the petition wouldn't be appropriate for Sheffield, largely because (according to the Council's figures) there are only a handful of people in the city who are sleeping rough.

Thank you everybody who has signed.

Had a phone call from a nice lady from the Council's PR department a couple of days ago. She began by assuring me that there are in fact only three homeless people in Sheffield (I'm not making this up) and when I questioned this explained that all those other people I've seen on the streets actually do have somewhere to go, they just choose not to. She took my email address and said she would send some stuff laying out the Council's position on homelessness, but so far nothing has appeared. Oh, and she also asked whether I had needed to get "permission" to start the petition, which seemed like a strange way of thinking about things. Going to approach Sheffield Newspapers to see if either of the local rags wants to run a piece...