Up against it: Tackling homelessness during times of strife

With a widespread rise in the number of people sleeping rough, housed in temporary accommodation, or facing housing insecurity, the UK’s homelessness situation looks set to only get worse. However, by working collaboratively and implementing innovative solutions, some providers are finding success. 

In 2017, more than 60 tents lined the tunnels and walkways of Milton Keynes. Dubbed ‘tent city’, the Buckinghamshire new-town became synonymous with rough sleeping and homelessness, with some drawing comparisons with the tarp-draped streets of downtown Los Angeles. 

Speaking to The Guardian in 2018 – when the number of tents on the city’s streets had fallen slightly – council leader Peter Marland blamed the problem on rising rents and years of austerity. “A lot of this is to do with service cuts, whether that be the NHS, the police, some council services, those support services that were previously there if you had a drug or alcohol addiction...With austerity, we’ve seen a lot of those services go away,” he said. 

In the six years since, the UK’s economic landscape has gotten bleaker, with inflation, the cost of living crisis, and other post-COVID hangovers continuing to bite. Insufficient levels of housebuilding and rocketing rents have only added to the housing insecurity of many. 

Given the turmoil, you’d expect Milton Keynes’ rough sleeping problem to have deteriorated, for its tent city to have grown into a metropolis of misery. However, when Unlocked spoke to Milton Keynes councillor Emily Darlington in January, the city counted just 16 rough sleepers on its streets.

2019: Homeless individuals in Milton Keynes pitch their tents beneath an overpass (Cr: Sam Forbes/Shutterstock)

“[And] the reality is that, the 16 people who refuse to come in in Milton Keynes...they’re still out rough sleeping because they’re refusing to come in,” explains Cllr Darlington, “not because we don’t have space for them.” 

Cllr Darlington attributes the Labour-held council’s success to several different factors, not least the willingness to bring together the areas of adults and housing – for which she sits as cabinet member. 

“It was really important to view the rough sleeping issue as much of a social care issue as a housing issue,” she explains. “When you see it as a social care issue, you’re much more likely to see the whole person and see the trauma that led them onto the street, and then deal with all the various issues that are contributing.” 

At the core of the council’s strategy is an all-in-one hub, located in the centre of the city. A former disused bus station, the space offers refuge for those in need of support and provides everything from drug and alcohol assistance to counselling and a cup of tea. A 19-bed shelter sits on the top floor, with the support services located underneath. 

Cllr Darlington says that, by bringing these services under one roof in an easily accessible location, the council has been able to not only take people off the streets, but keep them off. 

“Instead of running around the city and having to meet appointments,” she says, “it’s much easier to ask somebody to be on time somewhere where it’s easy to access and they’re already there because they’re having a cup of tea. 

“You’re setting them up not to fail. You’re giving them the best chance.” 

Cllr Darlington also sees partnership-working as key to the council’s success in tackling rough sleeping in the city. However, despite collaboration being “part of our city’s DNA”, she recalls the initial difficulty in bringing together the area’s voluntary sector. 

“When I inherited this brief,” she explains, “we had a homelessness partnership meeting; the charities would all come and yell at the council for not doing what they think needed to be done. 

“The charities themselves were duplicating activity. They were competing in that space. They were competing for fundraising, for all that kind of stuff.” 

Cllr Darlington says “difficult conversations” were had to ensure all parties were on the same page and understood that their interests were ultimately aligned. Aside from pointing out the futility of blaming others round the table, these “grown-up” discussions established what kind of support was needed, who needed that support, and how to better share information and improve communications to ensure a more efficient, joined-up way of working.

Cllr Emily Darlington, Milton Keynes Council

It was really important to view rough sleeping as much of a social care issue as a housing issue

The council’s efforts have borne fruit, with the city’s rough sleeping numbers falling substantially and its former reputation as a ‘tent city’ confined to the annuls of recent history. However, Cllr Darlington is all too aware of the need to ensure all parties continue to work together to achieve their shared goal. 

“It is about our desire to support people, and if we stick to that that we’ll do really well,” she says. “If we start turf wars or a blame culture, then it disintegrates very quickly.” 

The rural challenge 

Just 80 miles south of Milton Keynes, in the rural village of Lower Eashing, near Godalming, lies the headquarters of English Rural. As the name suggests, the 1,250-home housing association operates in a remote setting, where many might deem rough sleeping a non-issue. 

But rough sleeping exists in grassy hamlets just as it does in concreted conurbations – it’s just not always as visible. It’s this lack of awareness that English Rural is striving to change.

“[We’re] looking at how we can change a lot of the stigma and the assumptions around homelessness that lead us to think it's something that occurs in cities but not in rural areas,” explains English Rural’s strategic lead for rural homelessness, Rory Weal (pictured, right), “and as a result leads us to neglect investment in rural areas in many cases.”

He adds: “We've been trying to build a consensus around the problem, and our focus...has been very much on registering rural homelessness as something deserving of attention that requires a greater degree of weight within the existing strategies.” 

English Rural’s efforts stem from a report it helped commission, which was published early last year, that revealed the true extent of the “growing invisible homelessness crisis” within England’s rural areas. 

The report’s litany of findings and highlights made for sobering reading: a 24 per cent rise in rural rough sleeping in just one year; 86 per cent of rural providers perceiving homelessness as a “significant or acute” problem; 91 per cent of people witnessing a rise in rural homelessness over the past five years... the list goes on.

The study – which was undertaken by the universities of Kent and Southampton and supported by a group of rural organisations, including English Rural – led to the creation of the Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition, which English Rural chairs and leads. The coalition’s four main aims are to raise awareness of rural homelessness, develop and advocate for solutions, encourage the adoption of evidence-based best practices in rural areas, and team up with local authorities and others to address the challenge. 

To achieve these aims, Rory and co. have divided their work into separate strands. One focusses on service delivery, looking at how various housing-led service models, such as Housing First, can alleviate rural homelessness, while another ties together all the work around raising awareness and improving understanding of the issue. 

Rory Weal, English Rural

Our focus has been on registering rural homelessness as something deserving of attention that requires a greater degree of weight within the existing strategies

A third looks at improving data and strategies. “So, for example, the annual rough sleeping snapshot in many rural areas is an estimate based on quite limited information,” Rory explains. “The outreach team isn't covering many of the rural parts of the local authority, and that's where we want to see a bit more concerted action to broaden out how we collect data.” 

He adds: “If you start to build the better data and evidence of need, we think that's the route towards ensuring rural areas get the funding that they need to tackle the problem.” 

Rory is proud of all the coalition has achieved in its first year of existence, not least making rural homelessness “quite prominent” in the policy and political debate. Indeed, the coalition’s efforts were highlighted in a joint report published with the Local Government Association early this year.

Like many things in housing, working with others has been “essential” to the success English Rural and the Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition has seen in tackling the issue. “You need everyone, from the smallest parish council and community group all the way up to central government,” Rory says, “and that's what been trying to build across the board.” 

The coalition has so far centred its efforts on rough sleeping and the most “acute ends” of homelessness. But over the next couple of years, the team aims to expand their efforts so that all forms are covered. 

“I'm certainly optimistic of what can be achieved in five years,” Rory says. “We're obviously not anywhere close to ending homelessness at the moment, but if we get those crucial ingredients of ensuring we have the investment in affordable housing and, crucially, that that investment also goes to rural areas that are facing these really acute problems...I'm confident we can get a lot of people out of the experience of homelessness and into permanent housing.” 

Rapid rehousing success 

While English Rural opens a new chapter in their homelessness journey, at the other end of the UK, Perth and Kinross Council is busy trying to write homelessness out of existence. 

From 2017, the number of people presenting as homeless in the area fell by 39 per cent, the number of homeless people waiting for an offer of permanent accommodation dropped by 89 per cent, and the council consistently reports having the lowest number of people in temporary accommodation in Scotland by population (according to figures from February 2023). 

The council owes a large part of its success to ‘Home First’, a bespoke rapid rehousing model based on getting a homeless person or a person at risk of homelessness into settled accommodation, and then looking at what other needs they might have. The model is similar to the more widely known ‘Housing First’, but differs in some notable ways. 

“We called our model Home First at a point before Housing First existed,” explains service manager for housing Martin Smith. “And the principle was...going back to the original idea that that we get somebody the accommodation [they need] and then meet their other needs around that. 

“It's similar to Housing First in that way, but it's not for that niche specialist complex group, it's just a model that we apply to all homeless people.” 

The introduction of Home First in 2017 meant Perth and Kinross had a head start on the government’s instruction in 2018 for all local authorities to produce a ‘Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan’, with the aim of implementing these plans by 2023/24. Now, the council’s proactive approach is paying dividends, and its comparative success has rendered it a sector leader in tackling and preventing homelessness. 

In October last year, Perth and Kinross further expanded its homelessness provision with the launch of a new homelessness scheme for those with complex needs. Backed by £280,000 in council funding, the scheme has been developed in response to individuals who had difficulty maintaining a tenancy due to their need for a more tailored form of support. 

“We've called it ‘Intensive Housing Support’, but it's exactly the same as Housing First,” Martin explains. “Somebody gets a tenancy and the intensive support, and the two things come together. 

“It’s [for] a very small cohort of really complex people that couldn't manage in the normal way, if you like.” 

Despite the council’s successes, there are increasingly obvious signs the wider system is starting to strain. The latest homelessness statistics, published last month, showed there were a total of 30,724 open cases in the six months to September 2023, a rise of 10 per cent; 20,144 homeless applications, a rise of three per cent; and more than 15,000 households housed in temporary accommodation, a rise of eight per cent. 

In addition, nearly 10,000 children are now being housed in temporary accommodation. 

It’s findings such as these, alongside the Scottish government’s recent decision to cut nearly £200 million from the Affordable Housing Supply Programme, that led CIH Scotland to declaring a housing emergency at this year’s Scotland’s Housing Festival; following the likes of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Argyll and Bute, who all declared their own emergency last year. 

Perth and Kinross Council hasn’t been immune to these pressures. The “biggest challenge” the council faced came last year, when it suffered a significant reduction in the supply of properties due to fewer new-build completions and lower levels of stock turnover. Many key homelessness indicators started to slip as a result. 

“We still had the best performance in Scotland, but it was it was a deterioration for us,” says Martin. 

“We've worked really hard to get things back on track. The supply situation has normalised, demand pressures have reduced compared to last year, and we’ve got everything back to where it should be now in terms of the backlog and the timescales for people moving through the system.”

Orange line shows the number of homeless presentations; dark-blue line shows the number of households in temporary accommodation (Cr: Perth and Kinross Council)

The choppy waters have now calmed, but Martin knows the coming years won’t necessarily be smooth sailing. “In the current year, we have a further increase [of homeless presentations] compared even to last year,” he says. “I think that sort of demand pressure is something that's going to continue." 

He adds: “The housing system as a whole is just under huge pressure.” 

Holding back the tide

That pressure is not confined to Scotland. The latest homelessness figures for England show that, between 1 July and 30 September last year, there were 109,000 households in temporary accommodation, an increase of 10 per cent on the same period in the previous year. 

Further, the number of households with children in temporary accommodation rose by 12 per cent, while there was a 16 per cent rise in the number of people owed a main homelessness duty (where an applicant is eligible for assistance, unintentionally homeless, and falls within a specified priority need group). 

The rough sleeping statistics are just as concerning, with an estimated 3,898 people sleeping rough during the period – a whopping 27 per cent increase on the same period in the previous year. 

These figures come as we reach the precipice of the next general election – the point by which the Conservatives had pledged end rough sleeping for good. In fact, the UK government’s attitude toward rough sleeping has only grown worse in recent months, with former home secretary Suella Braverman calling rough sleeping a “lifestyle choice” and proposing new laws to restrict the use of tents.

Hannah Keilloh, CIH’s homelessness, planning, and domestic abuse policy lead, says more needs to be done at a political level to reduce the numbers experiencing or at risk of homelessness. 

“Tackling the homelessness crisis, including the rapidly rising numbers of households effectively trapped in temporary accommodation for increasingly long periods of time, which includes huge numbers of children, must be a priority for all parties ahead of the next general election,” she says. 

“Homelessness comes at an enormous personal cost, but also a massive cost to the public purse, with increasing numbers of local authorities reporting that temporary accommodation costs are pushing them to the brink of bankruptcy. We need political commitment and urgent action to turn things around.” 

She adds: “CIH is urging all political parties to commit to a long-term plan for housing which recognises it as the foundation for creating healthy and sustainable communities.” 

If you look hard enough, you will find instances where local authorities and housing associations alike are succeeding in their homelessness efforts, despite increasingly strong headwinds – whether it’s Milton Keynes and its collaborative, wrap-around approach to rough sleeping or Perth and Kinross’s early commitment to rapid rehousing. 

But with a worsening housing crisis, a turbulent economy, and a government that’s showing no serious commitment to reducing the UK’s homelessness numbers, this is a problem for which solutions are becoming ever harder to find. 

• Explore CIH’s homelessness resources

Main image: Shutterstock AI