A £392,000 GRANT has been handed to an Oxford charity to help tackle homelessness in the city.

Crisis Skylight Oxford won the funding from the Big Lottery Fund earlier this month.

It comes as the Oxford Mail revealed on Monday the number of people sleeping rough in the city had reached a record high.

On one night in November, 26 people were sleeping rough in the streets of the city, up from 19 the previous year.

Crisis Skylight Oxford director Kate Cocker said the money would enable the charity to help more people find homes and jobs.

She said: “We will be able to do a lot more one-to-one work than before. It will allow us to work with a lot more people.

“It will allow us to put forward a plan with them to help them individually and it will also allow us to do group work to help people move back into society.

“We will do group work and job clubs and help them to make job applications and run courses around how to produce a good CV.

“Part of what our staff do is look at what housing situation people are in.

“It will be very different if people are living rough compared to them being in a hostel and ready to move out.”

The grant was the first Crisis Skylight Oxford had received from the Big Lottery Fund since it was given £490,000 when it opened in 2010.

That money allowed the charity to run classes in subjects such as art, English and mathematics to get people engaged with mainstream activities again for the first time since they had been made homeless.

The new funding will allow the charity to move on from that and try to achieve its aim of ending homelessness by helping people help themselves.

Ms Cocker said: “Our aim is to try to end homelessness so we are not looking for a sticking plaster for people. We are looking for a long-term, sustainable solution.

“So it is about looking at all the aspects of people’s lives. It is about them having housing and being financially independent and having the best help that they can have.”

The rise in homelessness in the city comes after Oxfordshire County Council announced plans to slash its housing-related support across the county from £3.85m to £2.34m by 2016-17 because of Government cuts to its budget.

Ms Cocker said: “Across the country, homelessness is rising and we are seeing a greater number of people in need.

“The number of people is going up but the amount of funding that is available is going down.”