We need a fundamental reset of our broken homelessness system. Here's what Labour must do

Systems are intricate and organic things – they grow and they change. Often the system that exists now doesn’t have much resemblance to the one originally intended. 

This is nowhere more true than the system that has been designed and has grown to try and tackle homelessness in England. To speak frankly, it is unlikely that anybody would have knowingly designed a system where a family must be threatened with almost immediate homelessness before they can properly access help from their local council. Nobody would have suggested a system that spends more and more money on housing people temporarily while neglecting the things that caused the instance of homelessness in the first place. 

Nobody would choose a system that perpetuates emergency responses over preventing emergencies in the first place.

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What must give us hope, however, is that no matter how intricate and counterintuitive a system it can be redesigned and reengineered to produce better outcomes. In this case, it’s a system that can – and should – be redesigned to deliver far better outcomes for the over 300,000 people who experience homelessness in the UK each year.

In our new paper, A Smarter Approach to Homelessness, the Centre for Homelessness Impact worked with the Institute for Government to imagine what might need to happen to kickstart that process of redesign. The paper calls for a fundamental reset, moving away from policies and practices that embed emergency reactions to homelessness, and towards robust and evidence-based interventions that can prevent people from experiencing homelessness at all. Not only would this avoid the blight that homelessness can cause in people’s lives; it would mean a far more effective use of public money, and better value for money.

We also call for a cross-service approach to ending homelessness. Too often, homelessness is seen as a problem simply for the housing department of a local council, and yet we know that mainstream public services are settings where risks of homelessness or the first signs of an individual, couple or family getting into difficulty would be identified.

This might mean, for instance, universal screening of all secondary school pupils for risks of homelessness, using a light-touch digital survey taken in timetabled time in the classroom.

Schools are already piloting this approach in south Wales, central Scotland and London and Manchester. It might mean a local GP who, when carrying out a consultation, has a simple list of structured questions to ask if a patient refers to a health issue linked to their housing status, or indeed makes a reference to housing precarity. A cross-service approach to ending homelessness would mean that a whole range of bodies providing public services could be empowered to identify and help address the root causes that can lead to homelessness. A legal duty to prevent homelessness is already in place in Wales, and soon in Scotland public authorities and social landlords will be required by statute to ‘ask and act’ about a person’s housing status if they have cause for concern.

We also call for a new mechanism to drive this shift towards prevention. We say that the spending review in June is an opportunity to create a £100 million preventing homelessness endowment to be spent down over a 10-year period. This would, for the first time, lead at a strategic scale the funding, testing and scaling of promising interventions that prevent homelessness. It would allow us to build a new body of evidence of what helps to stem the flow of people into our overheated and over-stressed homelessness system.

In tough economic times, governments are faced with difficult decisions about how to maintain funding for the services that people care about. Since the election of this government in July last year, we’ve heard a lot about the state of the economy and the restriction this places upon spending. It is because of these things, not in spite of them, that committing to the preventing homelessness endowment makes sense. At present, we have a homelessness system that sucks in more and more money while delivering outcomes that are worse and worse. The government has an opportunity to be bold, so that we can prevent homelessness before it becomes even more costly – to the public purse and to people’s lives.

Dr Lígia Teixeira is Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for Homelessness Impact.

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