What are the elements for a long-term strategy to end homelessness?
Homelessness cannot be solved over night, but requires a long-term plan. An Inside Housing roundtable, in association with ForHousing, looked at the steps the sector should take. Illustration by Nick Lowndes
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What strategies should the social housing sector adopt when it comes to helping to end homelessness? For Colette McKune, chief executive of Salford-based housing association ForHousing, it is not by simply building more homes.
“Collaboration, working together and taking egos away are going to be key to even attempting to touch the problem that is homelessness,” she says, highlighting the importance of partnerships across the sector.
It was a recurring theme at a recent Inside Housing roundtable on homelessness. In association with ForHousing and chaired by Jack Simpson, news editor of Inside Housing, the meeting brought together a panel of experts to unpick how the sector can tackle a problem the charity Shelter says is affecting 250,000 people in the UK – the worst homelessness has been in 14 years.
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Working together
Molly Bishop, strategic lead for homelessness and rough sleeping at Greater Manchester Combined Authority, agrees with Ms McKune, saying: “No one organisation has all the solutions and can execute them all on their own.”
She explains that the authority’s solutions to tackling homelessness in the Greater Manchester region have stemmed from the “health of our partnership spaces and relationships”.
“What we do extremely well is provide healthy, challenging spaces where we can come together to do that work collectively and find a way through,” she says. “And what makes those partnerships healthy is not just having political [or organisational] leadership but value from people who have lived experience or frontline professional experience, so we’re valuing different forms of knowledge and insight.”
Matt Saye, interim director of operations at Onward Homes, gives an example of how his organisation – one of the largest housing associations in the North West, with 35,000 homes – has been working with others
in the Liverpool City Region to reduce homelessness.
He says: “All the housing associations in the area have come together to take a different approach to homelessness [in terms of] how they allocate homes to homeless people, [while also] looking at providing furniture and white goods to people by gifting, or looking at how we can provide early extensive support in the first crucial weeks of tenancies.”
As a result, he says, more than 1,000 households and “well over” 2,000 people have benefited from the collaborative project, with 97% tenant sustainment – a statistic he says “is better than our regular tenancy sustainment rate across all tenures”.
For Sue Sutton, chief executive of Salford-based social landlord Salix Homes, the pandemic has enabled organisations in her region to come together and “cut red tape” – a benefit she says would be “a crime” to lose.
She adds: “I still feel like there’s a bit of a tsunami waiting to come to customers in terms of short-term [government] initiatives being pulled, so we’re looking at whether we are best placed as an organisation [to address this] or if there are better ways for us to partner up with companies that are better placed to deliver certain initiatives.”
Fiona Humphrey, chief executive of Providence Row Housing Association – which houses around 600 people a year in east London and provides support services to most of those – highlights the fragility of some of the sector’s support service tie-ups – particularly during times of crisis such as the pandemic.
She says: “One of things we had to deal with during the pandemic is that we were the last man standing. So, people who had mental health issues were unable to access depot injections (a slow-release form of medication that lasts longer), or people with drug addictions were unable to access methadone.
“Those partnerships are absolutely critical for helping people who have become homeless, but it showed the fragility of them because at the end of the day, other people could walk from our residents and we never do.”
No safety net
This resonated with Jo Walby, chief executive of charity Mustard Tree, which works in the Manchester region to reduce poverty and tackle homelessness. “In reality, that safety net isn’t there and that became more apparent during COVID-19,” she says.
“We were pulled much more into emergency support. We had a food club that supported 500 people that we kept open, and we stayed open all through the pandemic, six days a week in Ancoats and Eccles in Manchester… There were 40 people left on the streets, March to July, and they were people with extreme addiction issues who couldn’t be inside for a great [amount] of time, or they had mental health issues and needed to be in hospital but had lost all trust in people.”
Discussing the challenges surrounding accessing and delivering support services more broadly, Kate Wareing, Soha Housing’s chief executive and a member of Oxfordshire Homeless Movement’s steering group, says support and accommodation aren’t “matched” well enough across the sector, which causes barriers.
“The accommodation might be available but the support isn’t so the letting can’t be made, or the support’s available but there isn’t any accommodation unless it’s in supported housing and that therefore doesn’t provide someone with security,” she explains.
Ms Humphrey and Chris Hildrey, director of Proxy Address, both describe support services as “fragmented”. Mr Hildrey – whose organisation provides stable address details for homelessness people – adds: “We have different scales of services set up to help but there’s so much overlap that it does seem, at times, inefficient.”
Elsewhere, there was agreement across the panel that a big driver of homelessness comes from a dysfunctional private rental sector.
Chris Wood, assistant director of research, policy and public affairs at Shelter, puts this challenge into context, saying 500,000 people are in rent arrears in the private sector, many of whom are facing eviction.
For this reason, he says, “one of our big campaigns is around more security in the private rented sector”. He adds that the organisation is also campaigning to get more social homes built across the country.
The private rental sector is a particular problem for the London Borough of Enfield, says Joanne Drew, its director of housing, who explains how the council is embarking on a “bold strategy” to make changes on homelessness, focusing on the private rented sector and whether it is fit for purpose.
“We are having to take a real interventionist, strategic role to fill in the gaps, by intervening in a part of the market that isn’t working,” she says.
This includes setting up an ethical lettings agency, enabling Enfield residents to overcome some of the barriers they might face in accessing private rental accommodation. “So, we don’t require credit references, we don’t require rent in advance and deposits, and we have a secure offer for residents.”
Gill Williams, chair of housing for Brighton & Hove City Council, flags similar problems, describing private rental as “very expensive and cut-throat”, with “poor conditions”. She says that her council “got everyone off the streets during the first lockdown”, adding that getting people into sustainable accommodation is now the challenge. “Social housing is the only answer, because you have secure tenure with sustainable rents.”
Ms Drew adds that Enfield is embarking on a 3,500-home council housebuilding programme after receiving £166m in grant funding – although she says that supply and labour pressures are a challenge to delivery, which is why the council is looking at innovative construction methods such as modern methods of construction to reduce timescales and give the programme greater predictability.
She adds: “We have a general lack of skills in the development world. Councils are competing with private developers and [registered providers]. We have a lot to offer in terms of enhancing a whole place and we do some fantastic regeneration schemes, but we have to convince development expertise to work for us.”
Cost pressures
Ms McKune says cost pressures will only become more difficult for the sector, citing how “the cost of decarbonisation is huge”, which will inhibit people from building new homes.
This is why her organisation is investing in its existing homes, she adds. “There’s a lot of embedded carbon in building new homes, so we have to look at repurposing [existing stock] and empty homes.”
Jo Richardson, president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, agrees, but adds: “We need a mixed economy – we can’t only have one product. It’s untenable, it’s unsustainable. We need to look at our existing stock and make the best use of that.”
The panel also touched on policy, including the need for cross-party consensus to drive real change. On this, Mr Hildrey says: “A large housing project takes about five years and if you want policy to be shaping that, you need to be having those conversations earlier.
“Moving the policy decisions outside the election cycle is going to be critical because housing and homelessness do not get turned around in five years unless something exceptional happens.”
Ms Wareing, meanwhile, points to an “easy win” via the planning system. She says: “Social landlords should write social rents into their Section 106 agreements. We pay about £50,000 less for a social rent property than an affordable rent property and the other people buying them off builders are doing the same maths. So, to be frank, the only people who lose out if you write social rent into Section 106 are the builders and even the chief executive of Taylor Wimpey is onside on this one as long as they know about it far enough in advance because they’ll just pay less for the land.”
David Bogle, chief executive of Hightown Housing Association, says the Homes for Cathy alliance of housing associations is pushing to involve the Regulator of Social Housing in homelessness, given its role is being reviewed.
He says: “We don’t want to divert from tenant involvement through the [Social Housing] White Paper, but there is a concern that if you focus solely on tenants, you forget that there are a load of people out there who haven’t been housed and they are our stakeholders as well. So this would be a game-changer.”
Participants
Jack Simpson (chair)
News editor, Inside Housing
Molly Bishop
Strategic lead for homelessness and rough sleeping, Greater Manchester Combined Authority
David Bogle
Chief executive, Hightown HA, and member of Homes for Cathy alliance
Joanne Drew
Director of housing, London Borough of Enfield
Chris Hildrey
Director, Proxy Address
Fiona Humphrey
Chief executive, Providence Row Housing Association
Colette McKune
Chief executive, ForHousing
Matt Saye
Interim director of operations, Onward Homes
Sue Sutton
Chief executive, Salix Homes
Jo Walby
Chief executive, Mustard Tree
Kate Wareing
Chief executive, Soha Housing, and member of Oxfordshire Homeless Movement’s steering group
Gill Williams
Chair of housing, Brighton & Hove City Council
Chris Wood
Assistant director of research, policy and public affairs, Shelter
