Fiona Colley, Author at Red Brick

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.

When we talk about homelessness, our thoughts often turn to people in doorways and tents, living on the streets of our towns and cities. Rough sleeping is the most extreme and dangerous form of homelessness and the increasing numbers experiencing it is easy to see. Shocking as this is, it is just the visible tip of the now vast homelessness crisis.

Earlier this month Hannah Keilloh set out both the human and financial cost of this hidden crisis. 123,000 homeless families are living in temporary accommodation (TA) including 140,000 children. More than £1.7 billion spent in 2022-23 to “temporarily” house people, often in appalling conditions. Two thirds of the families have been in TA for more than a year, some for more than a decade – their lives on hold as they wait for the settled and secure home that everyone deserves.

There is an urgent need for action to tackle this and last summer I was pleased to join Labour Housing Group’s policy working group to help develop proposals we would like to see Labour’s manifesto.

The Group’s aims were to bring forward proposals to reduce the cost of temporary accommodation and to improve the quality of accommodation being used. But also to work towards a greater mission – to prevent people from becoming homelessness and, when that isn’t possible, to ensure that temporary accommodation is truly temporary and their homelessness ended as quickly as possible.

Strategy and leadership to enable change

Tackling homelessness requires consistent, coordinated action and commitment across multiple areas government – national, regional and local. It requires a true team effort with government and public agencies working hand in hand with housing and third sector support providers and communities.

Adopting an overarching homelessness strategy might not sound like the biggest ask, and yet the UK is one of the few nations in Europe that does not have one. The next government should swiftly correct this. It should be coproduced and delivered in partnership with people with lived experience of homelessness, and the local authorities and voluntary & community organisations working on the frontline. It won’t be easy to break the silos. Strong leadership will be needed to develop and deliver this across government – the report recommends the appointment of a homelessness Tsar, who will need political support at the very highest level.

At its heart, Labour’s approach should have an understanding that the causes and impacts of homelessness are diverse and unequal. Women make up 60% of adults in temporary accommodation with violent relationship breakdown as a leading cause. Black people are three and a half times more likely to experience homelessness as White British people and a quarter of young people at risk of homelessness identify as LGBTQ+. Labour’s strategy must recognise disadvantage and discrimination. It must enable person centred and trauma informed approaches to meet diverse needs.

Low cost, high impact changes

Preventing homelessness and the need for temporary accommodation is our ultimate aim, but to alleviate the immediate TA crisis Labour must act swiftly to lower the barriers people face to moving on from TA, refuges and other homelessness accommodation. Too often people are stuck on social housing waiting lists and blocked from private rental tenancies. It is in many ways akin to bed blocking – people unable to move to somewhere more suitable and the “beds” in good quality, local accommodation unavailable for newly homeless people.

The report recommends that social housing allocation policies should give greater priority to people experiencing homelessness and that more housing association lettings should be reserved for people experiencing homelessness. The report particularly recommends that policies should far greater support to those who have spent more than a year in TA.

Action should also be taken to remove barriers from securing private rented accommodation. This should include increasing the budget and eligibility for Discretionary Housing Payments and enabling local authorities to expand of funding of deposits and rent in advance. Reforms should also require landlords and agents to accept offers of written guarantees (for instance from local authorities) instead of cash deposits.

Investing in the future

The working group recognises the financial and economic challenges a Labour government would face. However, there is strong evidence that investing to end homelessness is money well spent with PWC finding every £1 invested could save up to £2.80 of spending across the public sector.

We recommend a comprehensive, cross government review of current spending on supporting the homelessness crisis – both direct spend on TA and homelessness support and the hidden costs of homelessness including within health, social care and criminal justice budgets. Our proposals for investment include additional ring fenced funding for homelessness prevention, a local authority TA acquisitions programme and funding of a robust inspection and enforcement regime to ensure existing legal standards for TA are met.

Ultimately Labour must make it their mission to end poverty and destitution. That means investing to tackle the housing crisis by building at least 90,000 new social homes per year and, alongside the new deal for working people, fixing the gaping holes in the social welfare safety net.

With real determination and ambition we believe a Labour government could end the homelessness crisis and we urge Labour to take up this challenge.

Find out more

There will be an online launch for Labour Housing Group’s policy paper on temporary accommodation on Tuesday the 27th of February at 10am. Register for that here.

Click here to read the full report.

Fiona Colley is Director of Social Change at Homeless Link, the national membership body for organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England.