1 week Ago By [email protected] (Brad Harper)
A dangerous homeless encampment has been dismantled and fenced off as “mounding work” is set to get underway to stop it returning. Rough sleepers set up tents perilously close to the edge of Canterbury’s busy ring-road last summer but the city council issued occupants with an enforcement notice telling them to leave. The local authority had given assurances in October last year that there was “no intention to remove any tents being lived in” at the Pin Hill site or to “take away anything they identified as their possessions”.
Visible from the city wall and the bridge to Canterbury East railway station, the encampment consisted of a row of tents outside the Catching Lives day centre. Concerns were raised about how close the makeshift campsite was to the ring-road and that it could block the bus lane. But this week the site was cleared and fenced off after an enforcement notice was served last month .
A city council spokesman said: "It is positive news that the encampment at Pin Hill has ended following our request to all those living at the site to leave last month. “The enforcement notice has worked as we hoped it would.” The spokesman says council officers carried out a regular welfare check at the site on Tuesday morning and found it empty.
"We contacted Kent County Council (KCC) as the highway authority to come and fence the area off to prevent reoccupation,” he added. "This fencing is a temporary measure and KCC will be carrying out mounding work to stop it happening again. "We can confirm a total of 21 people who had used this site for sleeping since it was established have been found somewhere to live away from the side of the busy A28.
"This has been a complicated situation to resolve and we have worked with a range of organisations, including homelessness charities Catching Lives and Porchlight and the NHS, to provide access to healthcare, dental care and support to help people overcome addiction to alcohol and drugs.".
