IT seems, on the face of it, to be a bit of great news:

One hundred and twenty-four homeless people in the city are now going to have secure accommodation for another 12 months.

However it also begs the question – what happens after that?

When the pandemic broke out in the UK, the Government and local councils made a great fanfare about getting rough sleepers off the streets and into safe accommodation so they wouldn’t be at unnecessary danger of catching the virus.

It was convenient that lots of large places that normally provide accommodation – such as hotels, guest houses and student halls of residence – were empty, so they could offer their space.

However a lot has now changed since that early point.

For one thing, more and more hotels and guest houses are reopening, and many universities are expecting students to come back in September.

The safety offered by staying in one of these places is diminishing as more people return to use them, and it may be that the owners and managers would like to get back to using them in the normal way.

However, even if safety was not a concern and even if hotel managers were happy to carry on providing rooms to the homeless to keep them off the streets, this is still currently taxpayers' money being spent to put these people up every day.

And that's not to say it's not a laudable aim, to want to house the homeless – but it cannot be a permanent solution: the way to deal with homelessness is not to put every homeless person up in a hotel, or else you'd quickly find you had a lot more homeless people on your hands.

That means that at some point, either in July next year or later, unless these people have all been found permanent accommodation, they will have to gently be asked to please go and sleep on the streets again.

It's a problem that doesn't obviously have an easy answer.