Youth homelessness needs ambitious funding, not arbitrary discounts

Comment30.01.25by Phil Kerry

There is a tendency to believe youth homelessness does not exist so it is not properly funded, writes Phil Kerry, chief executive of New Horizon Youth Centre, as part of Inside Housing and Homeless Link’s Reset Homelessness campaign

Phil Kerry

Phil Kerry is chief executive at New Horizon Youth Centre

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Youth homelessness needs ambitious funding, not arbitrary discounts #UKhousing

There is a tendency to believe youth homelessness does not exist so it is not properly funded, writes Phil Kerry, chief executive of New Horizon Youth Centre #UKhousing

One of the young people at New Horizon Youth Centre once asked me if their age entitled them to a 25% discount off everything they ever had to buy: their bills, their food and even their rent.

The answer was of course no, but I could see why they thought it. Like every other 18 to 24 year old, they found themselves on the sharp end of an arbitrary triple discrimination simply because of their age.

As a young person, the stated minimum wage for their pay was less. Their Universal Credit was 26% less and because they needed housing benefit and were under the age of 35, they also found that was less – almost half of what mine would be in fact.

If you think the double bind that young people find themselves in is absurd, then I’m sure you’ll find the consequences of the state of things outrageous. Last year, estimates from charity Centrepoint showed that 136,000 young people approached their council as homeless. It’s a shockingly high number, but more so given how little it is discussed and how easily young people are de-prioritised.

“Housing strategies so often go the same way of other national plans and do not cater for young people as a specific cohort despite them experiencing homelessness differently”

For those of us who work to support people under the age of 25, we know it was ever thus. Society’s bemoaning of young people is so long lasting that there is even a word for it: ephebiphobia, the irrational fear of youth. Though perhaps it might be better termed ‘the rational disregard of those who do not vote’. For housing strategies so often go the same way of other national plans and do not cater for young people as a specific cohort despite them experiencing homelessness differently.

It is perhaps why the Homelessness Code of Guidance contains 26 chapters and not one covers 18 to 24 year olds. This is also perhaps why there is a young person becoming homeless every four minutes.

Youth homelessness is sometimes called ‘hidden’ because of the way that young people experience it: sofa-surfing out of sight, navigating the streets away from where outreach teams might find them. Because it happens beyond view, there is a tendency to believe it doesn’t exist. And because we don’t believe it exists, there is a tendency to underfund it. And because services aren’t resourced, the issue remains hidden and overlooked.

That might be understandable if youth homelessness was a niche issue, but the known scale of it dictates that it is anything but. Of all homelessness applications at council housing options teams, 17% come from those aged between 18 and 24 (despite just 8% of the population being that age).

Yet, ask the government if a similar proportion of funding goes to youth-specific homelessness services and the answer, though hard to find in the data, will be a resounding no.

“Youth homelessness is sometimes called ‘hidden’ because of the way that young people experience it: sofa-surfing out of sight, navigating the streets away from where outreach teams might find them”

The same is true for rough sleeping in London where near one in 10 of those bedding down on the streets are young and yet nowhere near 10% of the £100m that is spent preventing rough sleeping goes on this cohort. This is despite the same government strategy for ending rough sleeping detailing that 48% of all rough sleepers first did so under the age of 25 and why they said in their own strategy that “it is therefore critical that we intervene early and prevent the next generation of people sleeping rough”.

Deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner recently expressed frustration that for all they were doing to house those facing homelessness, more people kept losing their homes and replacing them. It’s a phenomenon well known to the homelessness sector and an obvious implication of the nature of its funding, which is heavily weighted to the point of crisis rather than the possibility of prevention.

Solving homelessness for 18 to 24 years olds is one such possibility, but only if the funding is there for young people to have a fair and equitable start in life.

2025 is the year that the Labour government will begin its stated aim of ending all forms of homelessness, and I firmly believe there is ample opportunity for them to do so if they are bold. But if it is serious about ending homelessness then they must first get serious about ending youth homelessness. To do so will need ambitious funding, not arbitrary discounts.