In my role with Homeless Link, I am fortunate enough to visit homelessness support and prevention services all over the country. And each visit reinforces two twin beliefs.
Firstly, our country faces a homelessness emergency.
Secondly – but just as important – homelessness organisations (many of them amongst the 750+ Homeless Link members), with tens of thousands of committed and skilled staff, have the necessary skills and ability to turn the tide and build a country without homelessness.
The opportunity we need to seize now
The government is right now preparing to publish a new Homelessness Strategy. This needs to deliver:
- An urgent response worthy of the scale of homelessness emergency.
- An ambitious, resourced plan to deliver on that vision of a country without homelessness.
This is not a case of a sticking plaster now and a 10-year plan later. These dual ambitions are two sides of the same coin. A long-term plan can only succeed if the immediate crisis is effectively relieved. And the same interventions that the long-term plan requires are critical to securing homes for those facing homelessness right now.
The emergency we’re facing
The scale of this crisis is difficult to overstate. Year-after-year, quarter-after-quarter unwanted new records are set as homelessness of all kinds spirals out of control. It is shameful that more than 130,000 households are currently living in temporary accommodation including just under 170,000 children.
At the same time, homelessness support services are being forced to close their doors due to financial pressures. There’s been a 43% reduction in the number of bedspaces in England since 2008. This concurrence is no coincidence
Years of austerity have unquestionably fuelled this cycle of crisis. The funding model for homelessness services has degraded into a patchwork of inefficient and bureaucratic grants. While those grant levels have failed to keep pace with inflation and years of rising demand.
None of this will have come as a surprise to the Labour Government. In opposition Angela Rayner rightly stated that current homelessness levels were “a national disgrace.”
But the numbers don’t lie and one year into a Labour Government homelessness continues to rise. Behind each of those numbers is an incredibly difficult situation for a real person and their family.
Progress has been made
That said, the Labour Government has introduced some welcome measures. The creation of the Inter-Ministerial Group on Homelessness is valuable recognition of the importance of cross-government working. The Renter’s Rights Bill will introduce new securities for tenants. And the repeal of the Vagrancy Act will be a major moment in the history of the state’s attitudes to homelessness.
But whether I’m in London, Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield or Doncaster, too often the message I hear from frontline homelessness support workers is “nothing much has changed.”
A real sea-change in approach is needed. More of the same will simply deliver more of the same results: rising homelessness, rising government spending and years of pain for people denied a safe and secure home.
The Homelessness Strategy can kick start the change we need to see
That the promised new Strategy has cross-departmental authorship is welcome. But more important is to bake in true cross-departmental accountability. For real change we need to see every arm of Government embrace ending homelessness as core to their mission.
This means a central, permanent ending homelessness taskforce to coordinate cross-departmental efforts. It means departments putting their money where their mouth is. And it means impact assessments on how all new policies could affect homelessness levels.
Housing, health, welfare, employment, immigration and more – every department has a part to play, but we particularly need strong leadership from the Treasury to fix the failed funding system that has caused the decline in homelessness service capacity since 2008.
The costs as well as causes of homelessness are cross-departmental. But those costs are simply not tracked. There’s no accurate figure for the amount paid in Enhanced Housing Benefit. The financial cost to the health service of homelessness is estimated to be huge, but potential savings to the NHS if homelessness was reduced are never factored into budget decisions.
We’re long overdue a systematic review of all spending and the true cost of homelessness. Once this is completed, a single ringfenced budget designed to prevent and end homelessness for good should be created. We’ll then be in a much better position to take informed, cost-effective and holistic decisions on homelessness policy.
Get this right, and we can break the cycle
These two measures – serious leadership on funding reform from the Treasury and genuine cross departmental accountability – can unlock the solutions to deliver on the twin goals I mentioned at the beginning of this article: ending the homelessness emergency and laying the foundations for a country free from homelessness.
With a full understanding of homelessness costs, we would avoid false economy cuts. Take Housing First for example – a proven effective – and cost-effective – intervention that supports people to exit rough sleeping and secure a long-term home. It is exactly the sort of intervention we should be championing and expanding. But due to a funding model that rewards short-termism, Housing First spaces are currently in decline.
And the most cost-effective way to manage homelessness is to prevent it happening in the first place. More importantly of course, this is also the best outcome for the person involved.
Through more cross-departmental accountability, we can make early interventions that prevent homelessness the norm across all public services: whether in schools, job centres or local health services.
Joined-up working is not only important at a Ministerial level of course. Some of the most effective cross-departmental working would be between local health and social care teams and local authority teams working on homelessness.
In Exeter and Eastbourne I’ve seen really successful examples of this – what a scandal that they are both facing funding cliff edges and risk of closure next March!
Instead these holistic models of service delivery should be supported, encouraged and securely and adequately resourced by central government. This is what we are asking this government – and I mean all relevant Ministers in this government – to deliver.
The next steps on the journey to a country free from homelessness
Homeless Link will be continuing our Breaking the Cycle campaign over the coming weeks and months.
If you are at Labour Party Conference you can find out more by joining the Labour Housing Group Fringe Event we are sponsoring – ‘Ending Single Homelessness under Labour.’ You can also sign-up to get our regular News and Updates emails.