Bring housing and homelessness services together to rebuild lives and save money

This World Homeless Day, Riverside’s John Glenton explores why the homelessness crisis is getting worse, and how bringing housing and homelessness services together can help alleviate the problem.

When something works, we tend not to hear much about it. 

News media rightly focus their time, effort and resources on digging out interesting stories about things that are faulty and failing and causing problems for people and their communities. 

There is great value in this. When media bring their weight to bear on an issue it focusses this challenge in the minds of the public, politicians and policymakers, and quite often a resolution is found. 

This World Homeless Day, I want to focus on a sector which many consider to be broken, a sector which feels like it is reaching breaking point, and a solution which is bringing both these sectors together and has proven itself to be successful. 

The broken 

For decades, not enough homes have been built to meet demand, and the scale of our housing supply deficit keeps growing year-on-year. 

Analysis by Centre for Cities comparing the number of new homes built in Britain (not just England) with the average built across western and northern Europe, found there is a shortfall of 4.3m homes missing from Britain’s housing market since the Second World War because they were never built. 

The scarcity of affordable housing in England in particular causes a wide range of problems, which include high costs to rent or own a home and a lack of social housing and affordable housing options that people can access.

The lack of housing is one of the most significant contributing factors as to why we now have the highest number of households living in temporary accommodation since records began. 

The latest government data released in July showed there are now 104,510 households living in temporary accommodation in England, an increase of 10% on the year before. 

While the lack of housing means an increasing number of people cannot afford housing, it also now means an increasing number of councils cannot afford the bill for temporary accommodation to house people in need. 

Analysis of expenditure by local authorities during the 2021/22 financial year showed councils in England spent at least £1.6bn on temporary accommodation.  

This is almost double the £845m spent on temporary accommodation six years previously in 2015/16.  

Earlier this year, Hastings reported having 1,000 people living in temporary accommodation, costing the local council £5.6m per year. 

This equated to an overspend of £2.384m in this area for the 2022/23 financial year and has now been cited by Hastings Borough Council as the main factor that could force the authority to go bankrupt next March. 

Similarly, Chelmsford City Council CEO Nick Eveleigh said in September: “We’ve run out of properties that we can put people in. There’s nothing affordable in Chelmsford, and I’m hearing of authorities up north that have run out of properties, too. 

“For a council like Chelmsford, this simply isn’t sustainable, as the increase in demand for temporary accommodation over the next 18 months is projected to cost an additional £2.7m per annum.” 

The breaking 

Now I’m going to turn to a sector which for years has not received a lot of media or policy attention. 

Supported housing provides a stable and secure environment for 140,000 working-age people in England at any given time. 

Data shows a high percentage of people achieve a successful outcome after a stay in short-term supported housing.  

Statistics from Riverside, the largest provider of supported housing for people affected by homelessness in the UK, show more than four-fifths of their customers (83%) moved on from homelessness in 2021/22 after staying in hostels and shelters for a maximum of 24 months.  

Every year, it is estimated more than a third of the 140,000 people – a total of 50,000 people –  get their lives back on track and go on to live independently in their own home again because of our sector's efforts. 

However, a further 50,000 people are being blocked from moving on to longer-term accommodation because of a lack of suitable homes, a report by the National Housing Federation (NHF) found earlier this year. 

The alternative for many of these people is alarming. The current life expectancy for those who are sleeping rough is 45 years for men and 43 years for women. So, preventing a person from sleeping rough through the provision of supported housing really is the difference between life or premature death. 

However, in spite of its success, the sector is struggling to cope with the financial stress of the highest inflation rates for more than 40 years. 

With energy prices still more than double their cost in 2021, and hikes in the cost of building materials, maintenance and increases in the National Living Wage, more than 90% of Homeless Link members said rising costs affected their ability to maintain service and support standards. 

As our sector has worked well and because many of our customers are recovering from trauma, supported housing has suffered from low public visibility. As a result, its value hasn’t been understood at a national level for too long. 

Earlier this year, the NHF and 13 NHF members, including Riverside, commissioned a report to provide the first comprehensive evidence base of how important supported housing is in getting people back on their feet and returning them to society. 

The report found that, without the supported housing sector, homelessness would increase by 41,000 a year, and our health services would need to provide an extra 14,000 psychiatric inpatient places costing £170,000 each per year. We would also need a further 2,000 prison places, costing £32,700 per year, simply due to licences or court orders being revoked. 

What's working: A Riverside case study 

The philosophy that prevention is better than cure is now a fundamental principle of health and social care strategies across the UK.  

This belief led to Sefton Council commissioning Riverside to run a homelessness-prevention service for young families in the borough. We initially set up the service with a ‘payment-by-results’ model, where the council would only pay if the service hit its targets.  

The pilot adopted principles from Housing First to deliver wrap-around support, providing person-centred support for families to help them sustain a tenancy. 

The Sefton Families Service targeted families with a history of failed tenancies who would benefit from intensive homelessness prevention support.   

Families taking part in the pilot were matched with a suitable two-to-three-bedroomed home in Sefton, initially on a supported licence agreement with Riverside.  

As part of the pilot, each family also received 12 months of intensive support from a specialist Riverside support worker.  

With a minimum of weekly contact including doorstep visits, the support worker helped families to develop the skills they needed to sustain their tenancy, including support around benefits, debt, rent arrears, utilities, health, domestic abuse, hate crime and anti-social behaviour.  

This homelessness-prevention service has had a profound effect on the stability, wellbeing, and independence of the families taking part.  

Of the 37 families involved, 36 have successfully progressed to a regular social housing tenancy with Riverside.  

The pilot scheme also has a benefit to the wider public, having saved Sefton taxpayers almost £900,000 in less than three years. 

With council budgets reduced and extremely stretched, it is understandable that neither councils nor we can step in and pick up the tab to roll out a homelessness-prevention scheme like this across England. 

An independent evaluation of Sefton Families Service found it generated a saving of £24,394 per family, the equivalent of a £3.36 return on investment for every £1 spent on the service. 

By bringing housing and homeless services together, we have now helped Sefton Council save a seven-figure sum. 

Families involved in a homelessness prevention scheme like this often have sensitive situations and include victims of domestic violence. As a result, it is not easy to attract attention to schemes like this despite the fact they are delivering exceptional results. 

However, we believe that every local authority could benefit from a service like Sefton Families, both socially and financially. 

If funding from health services, crime, housing and homelessness were pooled together and services were commissioned jointly, we believe money could be saved and lives could be rebuilt more quickly.

• Image courtesy of Riverside