An opportunity to do better on homelessness services
As homelessness rises 14% in one year, almost half of homelessness providers say they may need to reduce services or close. In response, Inside Housing and Homeless Link’s new campaign calls for the government to ‘Reset Homelessness’. Deputy editor Jess McCabe explains more about our upcoming plans
Jess McCabe is deputy editor (features) at Inside Housing
Inside Housing readers hardly need to be told how dire the homelessness crisis in this country has become.
The Labour government has made promising announcements in this area, but the service providers who work with people experiencing homelessness are in crisis.
The sector has a stated ambition to end homelessness. But, as new data from Homeless Link reveals, that goal seems far away.
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Homeless Link is a membership body for homelessness service providers, so has knowledge of what life is really like for these organisations: 19% of members, which the group surveys every year, have already reduced or closed services, and 47% are at risk of doing so.
Homeless Link explains what happened to funding in a new report, Breaking the cycle: Delivering a homelessness funding system that works for all.
It’s a story of a patchwork of funding in which small services have to stretch to fit grants and funding streams. It’s a story of losing good staff, because pay is low and uncertain, and then not being able to offer a consistent service to clients. And it’s a story of untraceable amounts spent through the housing benefit bill on exempt accommodation, for support of sometimes questionable value.
The report makes the case for a systemic review, with the aim of resetting how funding is delivered, putting these services on an even keel.
As the government looks at what it wants to achieve in the next parliament, the Plan for Housing campaign makes the case for a comprehensive, long-term policy strategy. There is an opportunity here to rethink, and do better on the homelessness part of the equation.
This is why Inside Housing is partnering with Homeless Link on a new campaign called Reset Homelessness. It has two aims:
- To call for the government to carry out a systemic review of homelessness funding, taking back control of spending in this area, and creating an effective new settlement for providers.
- As part of this, Inside Housing will, in the lead-up to the Spending Review this spring, detail the struggles providers face and how this affects people experiencing homelessness.
We’ll be publishing stories online this week that speak to the challenge of what this means in reality. We’ve broken down the detailed findings from Homeless Link’s report. We’ve interviewed some of the homeless people who are struggling to get assistance from their local authority (publishing on Tuesday). And we’ve interviewed Dr Laura Neilson, founder of the Shared Health Foundation, about its work highlighting the risks to the nearly 160,000 children stuck in temporary accommodation (publishing Wednesday). We’ll also be reporting on a winter night shelter for trans people (publishing Thursday).
We will be reporting more stories on these topics in the coming months. The status quo isn’t sustainable. The challenge for the new government is to do things differently.
Jess McCabe, deputy editor
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