At the end of January two separate, but also related, important items of local news were highlighted to me in the same week.

Jane Scott, leader of Wiltshire Council, announced that whilst savings of around £30 million needed to be made in the budget, she promised to prioritise spending on vulnerable adults and children. “If we do nothing else, we need to protect the vulnerable in our communities,” she said.

Rather ironically, only two days later, I was reliably informed that one of our partner agencies had just lost the battle for funding after a very long and arduous tender process. Not only had the Community4 tender for the contract been unsuccessful but the entire service was to be decommissioned due to a lack of funding.

This came as a shock to me since in a meeting at the council offices only four weeks previously, I was assured that there would be a future provision of service even if the current provider lost the contract.

Community4 was instrumental in providing an independent floating support service for those in social housing who, you guessed it, are the most vulnerable. Those who are housed but struggling to maintain their tenancies. Those who are experiencing mental health issues, debt, disabilities, illnesses, domestic violence, family breakdown, unemployment, substance dependencies, or who lack the skills to live independently. Those who are most likely to be evicted from their properties and find themselves homeless or those who are already homeless and are trying to secure accommodation.

Community4’s role was to intervene before the problems escalate out of control into a crisis, thereby saving further costly interventions from statutory services. Most importantly, Community4 offered a support service that could be tailored around the needs of the individual, a holistic approach – not a one-suit-fits-all approach which is adopted by so many organisations and allows people to fall through the cracks in services.

Here, at Doorway, we have worked very closely with Community4 since 2009. Not only are we providing a support service for those who find themselves homeless but a significant number of our service users have social housing tenancies and are what we term “vulnerably housed”. Which neatly ties in with Jane Scott’s promise to continue to help those who are “vulnerable in our communities”. And which also begs the question, just how vulnerable do people have to be to ensure that they receive the statutory funded services everyone deserves?

One of the Community4 support workers attended our open access drop-in sessions every week to engage with our guests in a relaxed, informal and safe environment, both through a formal referral process and on a social, more ad-hoc basis, thereby answering relevant immediate queries as well as supporting our guests over a longer period if necessary.

It prevents evictions, mediates with housing associations, works with other agencies such as mental health or statutory drug and alcohol services.

So, by decommissioning the entire floating support service, Wiltshire Council has once again proved that it is not empathic to the needs of the county, to those who are struggling financially or those who do not have the adequate life skills to maintain a home, those who are the most vulnerable.

I am reminded of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm where the last of the seven commandments “all animals are created equal” is eventually replaced with the maxim “all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”