Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children – in the Senedd at 2:24 pm on 5 April 2017.
I recently met with ‘The Big Issue’ and street vendors in Cardiff, and, as politicians and citizens alike, we can do more to help those who are sleeping rough, such as promoting the StreetLink scheme, which allows anyone to call or send an online alert about the location of someone they see sleeping rough, so authorities will then locate them and offer them that support. The expansion of schemes like this, however, illustrates that the number of people sleeping rough in Wales has jumped significantly, and Shelter Cymru has recorded a 63 per cent rise in people needing their service, and this is something that I think we need to tackle and to understand. I want to try and learn about those experiences myself, so I agreed, when I was there—. I don’t know how they managed to influence me, but I said that I would go out and become a ‘The Big Issue’ street vendor so that I could see how many I could sell, in competition with some of the ‘The Big Issue’ sellers. And I wondered, Cabinet Secretary, if you would like to join me one day—anywhere in Wales; it doesn’t have to be Cardiff, in the spirit of the all-Wales approach that we have—to come and sell ‘The Big Issue’ with me, to see how they operate and to see how they are making a living on the streets.