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At the moment, all UK hotel beds are sold as though they were luxurious luxury, used as a luxury leisure product.
Across Europe they are still sleeping bags in a little room on the end of a corridor, sleeping on huge curtains when the hotel is full.
But its onshore as well as offshore that the options of growing a unique new model of the modern working-class hotel is starting to change.
UK has the highest proportion of sleeping bags in continental Europe, being the second most common bed in continental Europe with Spain and Italy with higher proportions of sleeping bags than the UK.
The European Commission has set itself an ambitious goal of making the 20% of hotel rooms that are now sleeping bags available to the “long-term job seeker”, as well as the homeless.
Welcoming the offer from the European Commission’s Hotels for Jobs initiative the Homeless Foundation said that a handful of UK cities have successfully identified more than a couple of hundred beds in hotels which are being offered up to the homeless in years to come with a “long-term employment programme”.
“As of November we have received results from eight of the UK cities involved in the competition: Newcastle, Liverpool, London, Leeds, Cardiff, Hull, Sheffield and Manchester.”
In response to the European Commission’s hotel for jobs initiative Scottish cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stirling have also been trialling the use of hotels as workplace accommodation that could help to reduce the pressure on crisis accommodation services in the city.
The organisation “Runoff”, which helps homeless people transition into affordable accommodation, runs a programme, with residential-style accommodation in hotels, which is “impressive because they manage to provide an alternative to crisis accommodation.”
It not only saves the estimated 800,000 nights per year that go unused in crisis accommodation, it also makes the accommodation more competitive with the cheaper charities.
“It is a really, really great idea,” says Hannah, the CEO of Runoff, “to have sustainable employment solutions and them using the hotel space also allows people to be employed.
The hotel industry across Europe has estimated that 70% of rooms for working people could be “hours are selling all of the beds”.