Tag: Homelessness

Homelessness has rapidly become a key challenge facing local authorities. Spending by councils in England on temporary accommodation has reached £2.8 billion a year, up from £1.7 billion a couple of years ago.

This is causing great harm. There were 132,410 households staying in temporary accommodation in June 2025 because they risked homelessness, a record high. Almost two thirds are families with children.

Evidence shows us that children who experience homelessness do less well at school, have poorer health and are more likely to be impacted by homelessness in adulthood.

Costs are soaring but outcomes are worse. The reason? Homelessness spending is heavily skewed towards responses once individuals and families reach crisis. Our system reacts rather than prevents. Our aim must be to drive this system towards prevention upstream.

There are challenges in embracing prevention. Many local authorities are losing their institutional memory of what effective homelessness prevention involves; things like tenancy sustainment, legal support, advice on debt. Resources and capacity have been sucked into crisis interventions.

We also lack evidence of which prevention programmes work and provide value for money. This requires experimentation, coupled with independent evaluation.

Investing in prevention requires an up-front cost. Councils have to meet current demand and fund preventative services whose benefits take longer to emerge.

That’s why it was significant that Rachel Reeves, in the Spending Review in June, allocated £100 million over the next two years specifically for homelessness prevention. Its purpose is to ‘prevent homelessness through investing in early intervention measures’. Most of the money will come from the Transformation Fund to support fundamental reform of public services, overseen by the Cabinet Office.

Ideally, this should endow a national fund for research and development of early prevention initiatives to create change at a system level. Without national scaffolding – shared data, common evaluation standards and support for implementation – we risk repeating the “pilot malaise” that has held back progress for a decade.  It appears, however, that the Government’s preference is to pass this additional funding to local areas.

If so, it is critical that this additional funding does not top up councils’ current day-to-day homelessness spending, which will be drawn inexorably towards reactive crisis responses. More of the same will produce the same bad outcomes.

Local authorities should use part of this money to adopt or test promising early interventions.

This will require leadership. Prevention work is often less visible than crisis services. Polling evidence shows public support stronger for tangible things like emergency shelters, hostels and refuges than for prevention activity, although this still has majority support. When asked what would make the greatest difference in reducing homelessness, between 82% and 84% say refuges, safe houses and emergency housing, while 56% say investing in prevention services.

It will also require support. Some councils have shown they can innovate: the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, for instance, used data it holds on residents’ financial stress, such as council tax arrears, to offer them targeted support such as a debt repayment plan.

Such initiatives are very much the exception, however, not the rule. Councils vary enormously in capability. Expecting each to design, procure and evaluate interventions independently leads to duplication, slow progress and uneven quality.

And, for local authorities that do develop effective prevention approaches a big question remains about how this learning can be shared and scaled across the system.

This is where metro mayors and combined authorities can advance the devolution agenda by stepping up and leaning in to this homelessness prevention challenge. Combined authorities provide an appropriate scale for rigorous testing and shared learning: large enough for unified datasets and specialist expertise, small enough to stay rooted in place. They can take on the capabilities individual councils cannot realistically build alone – intervention design, behavioural science, predictive analytics, flow management, and evaluation methodology – and help ensure prevention becomes the norm, not the exception.

The rigorous evaluation and learning that determines what truly works must be coordinated. Combined authorities can ensure councils are not left to reinvent the wheel, and that learning can be generated once and shared many times. Councils should be held to account for investing in prevention, but not for running their own isolated R&D functions.

And city mayors and combined authorities have the heft to build approaches that sit well beyond the homelessness sector and embed primary prevention within mainstream public services, such as health settings, schools, and the criminal justice system.

It is also why national government must play a role as a catalyst: not delivering services, but providing the enabling infrastructure – data architecture, evaluation capability, shared procurement routes and implementation support – that allows the strongest approaches to spread with fidelity and pace. With national scaffolding behind them, combined authorities can turn individual successes into system-wide progress.

Labour’s manifesto for the 2024 general election promised a new strategy ‘working with mayors and councils across the country, to get Britain back on track to ending homelessness’.  The £100 million allocated from the Transformation Fund for homelessness prevention offers them the opportunity to do that. They must seize it.

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.

The Shared Accommodation Rate (SAR), the housing benefit rate available to childless, single people under 35, is creating a myriad of challenges for those seeking to move on from homelessness and for the authorities and providers trying to assist them.

Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates are not universal. Entitlements vary depending on circumstance, and people under the age of 35 are (unless they qualify for an exemption) offered the SAR – which is calculated to cover the rent of a single room in a shared house or flat, rather than, for example, a self-contained one-bed flat. But as uncovered in No Access, No Way Out, a recent report commissioned by Commonweal Housing, and authored by Becky Rice, the SAR has become a significant barrier to combatting homelessness.

Introduced by John Major’s Conservative Government in 1996, the then-SRR (Shared Room Rate) capped Housing Benefit for single under-25s at the 50th percentile – enough to cover rents of the bottom 50% of shared room lettings. Fifteen years later, George Osborne ignored the recommendations of the Social Security Advisory Committee and raised the age threshold to 35, whilst reducing the allowance to the 30^th percentile (from the 50^th) of local room rent averages. The reduction of social housing stock over this period has raised the importance of private routes out of homelessness, whether they exist or not.

For single under-35s, housing options at SAR rates increasingly do not exist. As No Access illustrates, the SAR is not routinely able to facilitate homelessness move-on. Recent London analysis (carried out by Savills) found the rental market totally divorced from LHA rates:

“Annual rental growth of 6.3% in London in 2023 led to the proportion of rental listings below LHA rates falling to a low of 3.1% of total listings by Q4 2023. The recent increase to LHA rates has pushed up the proportion of listings affordable to 5.0% of total listings in Q2 2024. While a slight recovery, this remains well below 30% of the market that is intended to be affordable on LHA.”

The same challenges are being observed all over the UK. The supply shortage is also changing behaviour in real time. Landlords, particularly those that specifically accommodate tenants on benefits, have taken advantage of the tilted playing field. Some are now only renting to claimants over 35 who can access the one-bed rate. Others are going further, with No Access interviewees (particularly those in London) reporting a wave of HMO to studio conversions, whereby houses of multiple occupation (shared accommodation stock, in other words) are split up into small studio apartments, often with shared facilities. This allows the landlord to charge the higher one-bed rate to tenants, and leaves those seeking to exit homelessness on the SAR with fewer, if any, options.

Article 4 directives, which force landlords to gain planning permission for conversion to HMO, are limiting the amount of newly available shared stock entering the market. In these circumstances, homelessness service providers are fishing from an ever-shrinking pond.

The effects of this unavailability are predictable and costly. Practitioners report being forced to use supported accommodation for clients under 35, who do not need such expensive services. As one provider reported,

“[Lack of move-on] blocks our … supported accommodation beds. They’re expensive and you need to keep them for those people that desperately need them. Unfortunately, you do have a case where they’re silted up with people who can’t move on.” (p. 53).

This matched other accounts:

“For under 35s my note says, ‘Nothing available.’ We basically have to go [to] supported accommodation for those people. So, we see a massive amount, we’re [seeing] 45% under 35 and so we know that it’s much harder, nearly impossible, to house in PRS for those under 35.” (p. 27).

Three months in supported accommodation provides one with an exemption from the SAR, but having to wait forces people to suspend hopes of long-term stability, and takes up a place others would benefit more from (not dissimilar to NHS beds being taken up by those healthy enough to leave, but with nowhere else to go). Homelessness support providers even report advising those close to turning 35 just to stay put before seeking move-on accommodation after their birthday.

It’s easy to frame this challenge as an inevitable result of a national housing shortage, exacerbated by landlord opportunism, clunky framework, and urban population growth driven by internal movement and immigration. What is harder to agree on is how to respond.

A potential solution would be to abolish the SAR altogether. This would provide more stability for those moving on from homelessness. Supported housing places would be freed up for those in genuine need, and councils would feel less inclined to hire private relocation companies to send homeless people to other parts of the country with more LHA supply. But tradeoffs are inevitable – the rental market is overheated as it is, and boosting demand to any significant extent would drive further price increases, which may fuel voter backlash.

A roll back option would be to reverse the Osborne measures – lowering the age threshold back to 25 and returning the benefit rate to the 50^th percentile. The risk here would be the failure to help 18–24-year-olds, with further reform on the issue probably unlikely. Other measures worth considering include a widening of the exemption thresholds to ease current backlogs and finding a way to challenge excessive use of Article 4 directives. What is clear is the need for revision of some kind, and a halt to the escalating bidding wars between councils (and in some cases, between council departments) for the dwindling number of affordable units.

As is so often the case, issues like these cannot be discussed without returning to the question of general (and publicly owned) housing supply. No Access makes a range of timely recommendations, much broader than the SAR – including the urgent requirement for new homes delivered at scale. SAR revision or abolition, and reform of the LHA more generally, must be linked to this delivery, along with the wider protection of tenants (something Labour have wasted little time on). This Government remains the UK’s best chance at easing and fixing the housing crisis, helping homeless people of all ages move on, and delivering better outcomes for renters more generally. Reform of the SAR is a necessary step in that direction.

Fraser Maclean is Policy and Communications Manager at Commonweal Housing. No Access, No Way Out, researched and written by Becky Rice with Commonweal’s support, can be read here.

The scale of homelessness across in England is unacceptable and is getting worse. Last week, the annual official figures showed that more than 320,000 households accessed help from their council last year – the highest figure ever recorded. It is vital that our response, as a sector, and in the corridors of political power, rises to the scale of the challenge. Let’s use this World Homelessness Day as a platform for bold, positive ambition.

In Westminster, we are in a rare moment of possibility, where fundamental change feels possible. Post-election I was delighted to see the Deputy Prime Minister commit to a new strategy – one that will tackle all forms of homelessness, not just rough sleeping – and the establishment of an inter-ministerial group to unlock the solutions across government. The commitment to work alongside Councils and Mayors also signals a fresh and empowering approach.

New energy and answers to homelessness are on the way. But what are the ingredients for success? What does bold and positive reform involve? Here are five key elements for success:

A housing-led plan

The pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the next 5 years offers the foundation for a breakthrough on homelessness. It is critical that a substantial proportion of these homes are delivered at social rent (the research suggests at least 90,000 a year) with local housing targets based on levels of homelessness in each area.

But it is not only about more supply. A housing-led approach to addressing homelessness is also about moving people quickly into a home of their own with the right support so they can build a foundation for everything else. This means actively decreasing the use of temporary accommodation.

A housing led approach is now the norm in many European countries, as recommended by the OECD, and is even the suggested approach for tackling homelessness in Ukraine. It is a long overdue paradigm shift in England.

Prevention

All too often, opportunities to prevent homelessness are known, but missed. Any strategy to address homelessness must have prevention as its cornerstone. There is a lot to learn from proposals in Scotland and Wales, where there are respective plans to introduce legislation that prevents homelessness at least 6 months before it occurs and to extend legal duties to wider public services.

The Homelessness Reduction Act was a vital step in the right direction in England, but it is time to go further so that the full public sector is working to prevent homelessness.

Addressing immediate need

Successful strategies must of course have long-term goals, and there are excellent examples in Denmark, Finland and elsewhere to draw on. However, in the here and now, homelessness is a humanitarian issue on our streets, hostels, B&Bs, and elsewhere. It is ruining lives and driving council finances to bankruptcy (the bill for temporary accommodation is £2bn and rising). We need to stop things getting worse whilst simultaneously working on the long-term reforms.

There is an opportunity in the upcoming budget to give councils the tools to address short term need, asking them to help more people out of homelessness by removing the cap for the temporary accommodation subsidy and by investing in Local Housing Allowance. We can also shift funding right now through the Affordable Homes Programme to deliver more social homes.

Focus on outcomes

Over the last 10 years in England, the political focus has been on tackling rough sleeping, neglecting the wider forms of homelessness. This has incentivised a focus on limited action and solutions. Of course, many good things happened because of this, and we should not lose sight of that. But we must also be honest in pointing to the range of other ways in which policies drove homelessness in the wrong direction; from the treatment of prison leavers; punitive welfare changes; the ‘hostile environment’ for people with no recourse to public funds, and of course the failure to build social housing.

The alternative approach is to agree the outcomes that all government policy should be driving towards – outcomes such as more people living in safe, secure homes, less expenditure on temporary accommodation and reductions in repeat homelessness. The Government need look no further than Wales, where such a framework was recently agreed and published.  

Localism

The increase of English devolution and Mayoral power has massive opportunities to show local leadership, progress elements of a homelessness strategy and test solutions at a local level that can be replicated elsewhere. We have seen examples of this already such as in Greater Manchester with an adoption of a ‘housing first’ philosophy for all residents of the city region to have a safe and secure home.

Right now, tens of thousands are trapped in poor quality temporary accommodation, hostels, night shelters, or forced to sleep on the streets, in cars, sheds, and public transport. We have a huge opportunity to ensure no-one experiences the trauma of homelessness again or when it does it is rare, brief and unrepeated. Let’s work together to make this happen.

We were genuinely heartened when it was revealed in June that Angela Rayner planned to create a new Ending Homelessness Unit if Labour won the General Election.

Labour has a proud record on this issue with previous administrations more than halving the number of households living in temporary accommodation between 2005 and 2010.

This achievement was even sustained during and after the 2008 global financial crisis, with Labour reducing the number of homeless households living in temporary accommodation by almost a quarter (24%) during the recession.

Similarly, between 1999 and 2001, rough sleeping was reduced by two-thirds, reaching an all-time low in 2010.

Over the past couple of years, the soaring numbers of homeless children and households living in temporary accommodation represents a humanitarian crisis unfolding behind closed doors.

Creating a new Ending Homelessness Unit and placing it inside the Deputy Prime Minister’s office means there will be a real focus on tacking this humanitarian crisis at the heart of government. It also provides the new Homelessness Minister, Rushanara Ali with support from the very top of government.

However, reducing the number of households in temporary accommodation will be an even tougher challenge this time around for the following reasons:

Firstly, in Q1 of 2024 the number of homeless children reached more than 151,000. This is already 16% higher than the number of homeless children during the previous peak in 2006, and continues to rise at record rates.

Secondly, the shortage of social housing has grown much more acute over the past 30 years.

In 1979, local authorities and housing associations managed 5.5 million homes at a time when the population of England was less than 47 million people.

As of March 2023 House of Commons researchers estimated there were around 3.8 million social homes in England at a time when the population of the country has grown by around 14m people to almost 61m people.

This means we have less social housing for people to move into leaving them stuck in temporary accommodation and hostels even when they are ready to move on.

Thirdly, the public finances have worsened and the resources currently available to the sector to tackle homelessness have been depleted.

However, we know what needs to be done to end rough sleeping and homelessness for people.

We can dramatically cut the number of people sleeping rough if targets are set and organisations are given the resources to achieve them.

These are three of the key steps the new government should take to halve homelessness again:

Ring-fenced funding

While public finances are tight, the new government must take an ‘invest to save’ approach if we are to reduce homelessness.

In the last financial year, government figures revealed that councils spent an eye-watering £2.3bn on temporary accommodation.

Over the past year, we have seen cash-strapped councils reduce funding for homelessness services at a time when homelessness is rising at record levels.

These specialist services are essential in ending the cycle of homelessness for thousands of people every year – and moving them on into general needs housing.

We understand why individual councils feel a need to cut homelessness services, as they weigh up the closure of one service against the closure of another.

However, it is important for government to understand that under-resourced councils closing homelessness services to balance their annual budget is a false economy.

Closing homelessness services means councils and ultimately taxpayers are forced to spend even greater sums of money on temporary accommodation, and it also means people affected by homelessness have worse outcomes and are trapped in homelessness for longer.

To end this vicious cycle, the government must provide ring-fenced funding for homelessness services to prevent cash-strapped councils from ending funding at a time when these services are needed the most.

We are calling on the new Government to ring-fence and increase long-term revenue funding for supported housing to ensure spending at least matches the £1.6bn per year allocated to local authorities under the last Labour government Supporting People programme in 2010.

Social housing targets

As well as the target for building 1.5m homes over the course of this Parliament we believe an annual target should be set for the delivery of new social homes.

By announcing a target publicly, the government creates pressure on the system to deliver the goal and a target it needs to reach consistently each year.

However, building new homes takes time.

Better use of existing housing stock

Riverside manage more than 75,000 homes as well as homelessness services across more than 160 local authority areas in England.

Insight from this experience leads us to think there is also an opportunity for central government and councils to unlock savings by making better use of existing housing stock.

Since 2019 Riverside has been running Sefton Families Service on behalf of Sefton Council, a service which helps break the cycle of homelessness for families placed in temporary accommodation.

The service sees residents live in a fully-furnished home on a 12-month trial period with intensive support provided by a Riverside support worker rather than in temporary accommodation.

The scheme currently has a 97% success rate with every participant transferring to a long-term social housing tenancy with Riverside. Indeed, the only exception was a family who wanted to move to a permanent home outside of Sefton.

Sefton Families Service has enabled 60families to break the cycle of homelessness, including one family who had previously had to move home 37 times.

As well as making a huge difference to the lives of the families it has supported, the service is estimated to have saved the council £1.6m over four yearscompared to the cost of temporary accommodation, which is over six times as expensive as Riverside’s service.

While there is a mountain to climb, by taking an ‘invest to save’ approach, we believe that this new Labour government can halve homelessness again.

And we know the whole homelessness sector wants to work with government to help them achieve this.

Imagine the transition from childhood to adulthood as a ladder. At each point you reach out there are rungs of opportunity – housing, education, hobbies, employment, training, qualifications.

Imagine there are people at the top and bottom of the ladder – parents, family, teachers, friends, tutors, mentors, youth workers – helping you navigate the rungs, keeping you on track and encouraging you when you struggle. If you fall, there is a harness of state support to catch you.

Now imagine that these rungs of opportunity keep disappearing from your grasp and you face discrimination at every turn. Imagine that the people you relied on to help you keep leaving, or perhaps were never there in the first place.

The harness has broken; suddenly all you have is yourself and a ladder with no rungs.

This is the situation which many of our young people who are experiencing homeless find themselves in when they come to New Horizon Youth Centre.

Young people come to us looking for housing support to restore a desperately needed rung on their ladder (a step onto the housing ladder, you might say), but they stay to climb further into employment, education, and training. They stay to build their support networks of people who don’t give up on them.

But how do we make sure that young people never face those challenges in the first place? When 136,000 young people experiencing homelessness are turning to their councils each year, it shows us that way too many young people have broken ladders.

So, fixing this must be fast, radical, and really work. That is why over 130 charities across the UK are campaigning for a cross-departmental Government strategy to end youth homelessness: a #PlanForThe136k.

This collective knows what works when ending youth homelessness and they know how to help young people safely climb to the top. But to ensure no-one ever faces a broken ladder again, we need the Government to step up and make young people a priority.

Here are a couple of evidence-based solutions that could end youth homelessness for good:

Removing financial discrimination

When trying to climb up to decent employment and housing, young people find themselves entitled to a lower minimum wage, they receive less Universal Credit and are only eligible for shared housing allowance (which is less than what over 35s get).

We must stop assuming that all young people have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ to act as a harness, or that living in shared houses is safe and suitable for all.

When a young person becomes homeless due to financial pressures, such as we are currently facing in the cost-of-living crisis, they are not a priority in the Homelessness Reduction Act. So, their age means they are often blocked from getting homelessness support by local authorities. But with the existing discrimination to wages and housing benefits, it also means they can’t afford to live independently in their own homes.

We have to end financial discrimination and give young people fair wages, fair benefits and access decent financial support when they need it.

Creating the housing young people need

Let’s focus on creating the sort of housing that young people can benefit from. Because councils are so stretched, young people are usually not priority need for social housing, or even temporary accommodation. And on the rare occasion they are placed in temporary accommodation, it can be totally unsuitable.

Instead, charities are helping to fill some of this gap. They show how public, private, and voluntary sector partnerships can provide suitable, secure accommodation for young people that sustainably solves their homelessness.

We need these projects to be scaled up massively and available for all young people who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness.

An example is St Basils who run a Live & Work Model accommodation project in the West Midlands for young people, to ensure they can safely climb up their ladder with rungs of housing and employment.

It looks like this:

• St Basil’s Live & Work accommodation offers young people aged 18-25 the opportunity to access high-quality, low-cost stepping stone accommodation, which enables them to live and work, without the complexities of navigating the benefit system, for a settled period to save and extend their choice of next step accommodation.
• Phase 1 which opened in 2015 comprised student style furnished flats at rents reduced to a level that enabled young apprentices to pay their rent and energy costs through their earned income. Since then, over 170 young people have lived in the scheme, all working and moving on when they have saved. None have claimed housing benefit.
• Phase 2 has just finished providing a further 54 studio apartments for young workers at deflated rents.
• The Live & Work accommodation is supportive rather than supported accommodation but St Basil’s on-site bespoke housing management staff will be on hand to provide guidance and to help them sustain their home.

“From St Basil’s perspective, the scheme extended our options for young people without family support, enabling them to benefit from similar opportunities to their contemporaries, who do have such support.

“In Phase 1, the young people were all overcoming difficult starts, some with multiple needs and all with the trauma of the underlying issues which lead to homelessness. None have returned as homeless.” St Basil’s CEO Jean Templeton.

This is just one example that shows that by making sure young people having living rents and living wages, we can help them safely climb their ladders.

Our campaign

Ending financial discrimination and expanding St Basil’s Live & Work model for housing are a couple of the vital solutions recommended by our campaign, #PlanForThe136k.

Our evidence-based strategy for ending youth homelessness is organised into three areas: prevention, housing and finance.

We are calling on political parties to adopt our strategy before the general election, so that the next Government is committed to making ending youth homelessness a priority.

You can get involved by signing and sharing our parliamentary petition calling for a cross-departmental strategy to end youth homelessness:

You can get involved by spreading awareness about the campaign and calling for the solutions within your party, with your colleagues in local councils and with your MP.

We can make it easier for young people to climb between childhood and adulthood. We can give them the support they need to thrive. We can prevent 136,000 young people becoming homeless. But we just need political will to do so.

Editor’s note: Anybody interested in this campaign can get in touch with Phil at phil.kerry@nhyouthcentre.org.uk