PROPOSED funding cuts feared by homelessness charities and police have been made real by West Sussex County Council.

After weeks of speculation, the council has confirmed it will cut the housing related support budget from £6.3m to £4.6m in 2019/20 and then to £2.3m in 2020/21.

Other cuts will see the local area assistance budget, which provides crisis support, such as food banks and Citizens Advice, reduced from £807k to £200k per year.

And the minimum income guarantee, which gives people who receive publicly funded care and support enough money to cover day-to-day living costs, will be cut to the statutory minimum.

In an ideal world, West Sussex wouldn’t have had its government funding cut by £145m in the last eight years, cutting £200m from its own budget over the same period.

In an ideal world, the county wouldn’t have to find another £145m of savings over the next four years and it wouldn’t be facing a gross budget gap of £50.9m in 2019/20.

But in an ideal world people wouldn’t be sleeping on the streets or be in such dire financial straits that they need to use food banks. And they wouldn’t have to look to the council for help.

Sussex Police and the homeless charity Stonepillow have issued stark warnings about the consequences of the cuts.

There were fears of more deaths among rough sleepers, as well as concerns about the monitoring and support of hundreds of sex offenders following their release from prison.

Council leader Louise Goldsmith said: “It’s natural that they would raise all those concerns and of course we listen to those concerns.”

West Sussex has been funding housing related support out of its core budget since 2011, when the government’s Supporting People grant was cut.

Mrs Goldsmith said: “There are parts that we don’t have to fund and that’s what we’ll be looking at, but there are a lot of old contracts currently within that supported housing which are really not fit for purpose. So it’s absolutely right that we go through this process.

“This is probably one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever made, but the financial situation is also equally hard.”