What is homelessness?
Why is tackling homelessness important?
Tackling homelessness therefore is important for multiple reasons, with some of the most crucial being it ensures individuals are safe and comfortable which in turn better protects both their physical and mental health.
1. Improves Public Health
Homelessness and poor public health outcomes have a strong correlation. Without stable housing, individuals often face increased exposure to illness, limited access to medical care, and higher rates of chronic disease. Reducing homelessness can improve public health and reduce healthcare costs.
2. Economic Benefits
Tackling homelessness and funding temporary housing can be expensive, especially when local authorities rely on hotels or bed and breakfast places. It often leads to increased spending on emergency services, law enforcement, and healthcare.
Providing stable housing can be cost-effective in the long term, better address the disparities across a community, and contribute to a more productive society.
3. Improves social stability
One of the biggest impacts of homelessness is social instability and increased crime rates. By addressing this issue and both tackling and preventing homelessness, your local authority can create safer and more cohesive communities.
4. Improves quality of life for children and young people
Some of the most vulnerable people that suffer the most from homelessness is children and young people. Homelessness can severely impact their quality of life in many ways including their education, development, and their mental health. Some of the most common mental health problems experienced include anxiety and depression.
Ensuring stable and high-quality housing for families therefore better supports educational outcomes and long-term prospects for children and young people.
5. Reduces inequalities and disparities
By tackling homelessness your local authority can take a proactive approach in addressing the wider social determinants of health as well as address systemic issues such as fuel poverty, unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing, contributing to greater social and economic equality.
Homelessness Rates in the UK
Homelessness rates differ significantly across the UK due to it being recorded differently in each nation. Instead what can be compared is the number of people rough sleeping and using temporary accommodation. These findings often get compared quarterly and annually to analyse the trajectory of the rise and fall of homelessness locally, regionally, and nationally.
For the last five years ‘core’ homelessness has been rising year on year across England. Reaching its peak in 2019, over 208,000 households were homeless in 2018 reaching over 219,000 in 2019. Following this increase the UK Gov’s quarterly statistics on homelessness and temporary accommodation highlight that temporary accommodation rates have risen again by over 12% in the last year.
It was recorded that 82.2% of households with children by the end of December 2023 were in self-contained accommodation and that 15,950 households living in B and B accommodation a 33% increase from last year.
Due to the way the rates have been increasing and exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis, The Homeless Monitor Great Britain estimated that if nothing changes over 300,000 households could face the worst forms of homelessness.
More proactive methods are vital to put in place to help your local authority not only tackle homelessness but also prevent it in the first place so both your resources and budgets do not get overstretched by the increasing demand for support and dependency on temporary housing.
The remainder of this article will highlight the key challenges your local authority should be aware of when tackling homelessness prevention to enable individuals to live in safer and more stable housing to break the homelessness cycle and reduce your homelessness rates in your community.
Homelessness Prevention – What are the challenges?
Preventing homelessness is never an easy task for any local authority regardless of their size, but it can be even more challenging for smaller local authorities who have to stretch their resources and budgets even further. Below are just some of the main examples of key challenges your local authority or neighbouring local authorities can be struggling with when tackling homelessness in your local area:
1. Limited resources
All local authorities across all support services are struggling with managing limited budgets and their resource allocation, housing services, and tackling homelessness is no different. Here limited budgets make it difficult to allocate sufficient funds for housing programs, social services, and emergency shelters.
As a result, the dependency on temporary accommodation has been increasing dramatically. Whilst this solution helps in the short-term it is very costly taking up significant amounts of local authority budgets, and doesn’t always help with long-term objectives and placing individuals and families into more permanent housing.
2. Lack of affordable housing
Another key hurdle that needs to be addressed is the critical lack of affordable housing. High rental costs, insufficient housing, and poor quality housing limiting the options available for individuals and families. This, in turn, increases the risk of homelessness and the cost-of-living crisis has only been exacerbating these issues further as average rent for homes in England has increased by 9% in the last year alone.
3. Managing the complex needs of individuals
People experiencing or at risk of homelessness often have complex needs, including mental health issues, substance abuse, and chronic health conditions, requiring comprehensive and coordinated support services. More preventative support must be delivered to these at-risk populations to help avoid homelessness altogether.
4. Stigma and discrimination
The stigma around homelessness and how people have become homeless make it harder for some local authorities to help find more permanent housing for individuals. This in turn can lead to discriminatory practices in housing and employment making it harder to find stability for these individuals to access the support they need when they need it.
One example would be the lack of engagement from landlords to provide and offer housing options for individuals in temporary accommodation due to fears they won’t pay rent or that they will be disruptive tenants.
5. Limited coordination and collaboration
For homelessness prevention to be effective, a collaborative approach across multiple stakeholders is needed to enable local authorities to obtain accurate real-time data on individuals seeking housing support to better address the inequalities of the community.
This is essential to monitor the data and patterns and rates of homelessness across your local community, but, it can be challenging for plenty of local authorities due to their limited tools and resources in collecting, understanding, and analysing this data.
Ways to prevent homelessness
As discussed above there are many challenges that can occur when preventing homelessness. Addressing these challenges requires a collaborative and multifaceted approach, combining immediate relief efforts and more long-term solutions to address the root causes of homelessness.
There are many ways homelessness can be prevented, what is clear is like other local government services, investing in digital solutions can help optimise and streamline workflows and processes as well as provide better preventative and early intervention support services to both tackle and prevent homelessness in the first place. Below are just some ways technology can help prevent homelessness.
1. Streamline Temporary Accommodation Services
One way to tackle homelessness with technology is to streamline your temporary accommodation services. As discussed above the increasing homelessness rates result in more dependency and pressure on temporary housing and subsequently local authorities.
There is a big risk that with the rising demand local authorities will have limited availability or end up working with housing providers that are not fully compliant or cannot deliver any additional needs required. This, in turn, can worsen the issues surrounding homelessness in your local authority.
Investing in housing management solutions therefore offers your local community the opportunity therefore to streamline the process, improve onboarding and contracting, and most importantly your compliance. At Access Adam Housing, our automated compliance ensures you only ever work with 100% complaint providers that also match any additional criteria that individuals and families in your community may have.
WREN Housing for example has had over 38,000 safety certificates automatically checked across over 350 different providers to instill more confidence in your workforce that individuals will only ever be placed with fully compliant providers. This, in turn, since they started using our system, has placed over 10,000 households into safer and more compliant temporary housing.
Milton Keynes City Council is another example of a customer that has hugely benefitted from digitally transforming their housing services.
Milton Keynes since using our Housing Management Solution has increased their supplier base from 4 to a staggering 240 to help their community find more appropriate housing quicker. Now, 99.5% of Milton Keynes properties are compliant in providing the housing needs of the community thanks to our end-to-end solution.
2. Increase Landlord Engagement
As much as digitally transforming housing services to improve temporary accommodation is important, at Access Adam Housing we want to go one step further and help support councils with long-term strategies to tackle homelessness.
Our partnership will Milton Keynes Council has helped to increase landlord engagement through their AST scheme. We were able to build a bespoke solution according to their needs to better incentivise their landlords and enable the establishment of more secure tenancies to last 2 to 3 years providing the support they need to never get stuck in the homelessness cycle again.
Since we started our work with Milton Keynes on their AST scheme we have helped 104 households move out of temporary housing into more secure tenancies and housing. Currently, they have over 200 complaint houses in the scheme to help prevent homelessness.
Despite Milton Keynes having to pay landlords to incentivise them into the scheme, they have been able to generate significant cost savings by reducing their costly expenditure on temporary housing. This is an example of a great step forward in increasing landlord engagement with digital solutions to prevent and tackle homelessness head-on.
For more information on how we can help with your local authorities’ homelessness prevention strategies contact us today.
3. Early Intervention Services
One way digital solutions can help prevent homelessness is through using population health approaches and collaborating with primary and social care services to identify at-risk populations of homelessness to ensure the right support is provided to them before it’s too late.
Whether it’s employability support, debt advice, or support with managing the fuel crisis, collaborating with multiple stakeholders across the community can help you identify the housing needs of your community at a much faster rate to better address the wider social determinants of health and reduce the dependency on primary care.
Here investing in digital solutions can make data sharing seamless by integrating with multiple systems, avoiding rekeying data continuously, as well as embedding social prescribing in housing more efficiently in your local authority by having all this information centralised in one place.
Through using population health approaches and social prescribing in housing, our social prescribing software helps capture the root causes of homelessness in your community to enable flexibility and adaptations to services to better support the needs of your community.
Warm Wales, for example, has highly benefitted from investing in Access Elemental Social Prescribing by tackling fuel poverty head-on to ensure individuals live in warmer, safer, happier homes. Since working with us they have delivered over 7,6000 interventions to support housing issues and prevent fuel poverty and homelessness which in turn has generated cost savings of over £521,000.
By investing in early intervention solutions not only can you tackle homelessness you can also help your local authority prevent homelessness in the first place by acknowledging the impacts housing issues can have on individuals both physically and mentally sooner to avoid homelessness and instead provide better support to improve both their physical and mental health.
4. Raising awareness by sharing best practices at events
Attending events like Housing 2024 is pivotal in preventing homelessness by enabling stakeholders to discuss what strategies work and what don’t. One of the biggest themes at Housing 2024 was the best ways to prevent homelessness and support individuals in temporary accommodation.
Over the three-day event, numerous talks showcased successful projects by various housing associations and local authorities. A crucial takeaway was that any effective homelessness prevention strategy must include landlords and housing organisations. Co-production and a multifaceted approaches are essential to develop robust, long-term strategies to break the cycle of homelessness, secure permanent housing, and prevent homelessness altogether.
Examples include Rochdale Borough Council, who works hard to ensure all temporary accommodation changes are more self-contained. By considering wider needs like travel costs for education and work, and upskilling temporary accommodation staff on housing standards, they have created safe spaces for children to do homework and areas for babies to sleep, which families can take with them as they move to permanent housing.
Similarly, Switch Hospitality help prevent homelessness by keeping hotels open during the pandemic, creating high-quality temporary accommodations. With facilities like cooking areas and rooms with laptops for schoolwork, they now house 1,000 people a week and have contracts with 15 local authorities and 5 hotels in London alone, showing significant scaling from initially supporting the Birmingham area during Covid. Their collaborative approach has transformed rooms into self-contained units, reducing waiting lists and improving quality of life.
Managing temporary accommodation with an understanding of individual and family needs is vital. Factors like accessible transport, amenities, and safe, self-contained spaces are essential. Events like Housing 2024 foster collaboration among stakeholders, helping develop more effective strategies to prevent homelessness and support independent living.
Preventing homelessness – Summarising how to do it?
This article has reviewed what homelessness is and why is it important to tackle homelessness by taking a collaborative approach with multiple stakeholders across your local authority.
By addressing the housing challenges facing local authorities currently, this article also reviewed the increase in homelessness rates over the past few years and the impacts it has on individuals, families, and the wider community.
There is a clear objective that local authorities want to tackle homelessness and eventually prevent homelessness altogether in more proactive measures. However limited resources and budgets make it harder for local authorities to cope with the increasing demand, which in turn makes the housing support offered more reactive offering more short-term solutions instead of proactive and preventative to deliver better long-term support.
By addressing these challenges in more detail, this article has addressed the opportunity investing in digital solutions has to transform your housing services for the better to prevent homelessness both now and in the future.
Investing in housing management solutions therefore helps your local authority both streamline existing housing services to seek compliant temporary housing more efficiently to reach demand, whilst also building on existing homelessness prevention strategies to deliver better proactive services that both address the root causes of homelessness as well secure more longer tenancies for individuals.
By explaining the fundamentals of our Access Adam Housing solution we explained not only how individuals and families can be placed in temporary housing quicker, but often at a fraction of the price due to increasing supplier bases allowing your local authority to have more options so you never risk using an incompliant provider again. Through automating these processes more time can be spent with individuals and families on addressing root causes of their homelessness to offer more targeted support to help them get back on their feet.
This can then be extended further by the collaboration of stakeholders to deliver more efficient social prescribing in housing. Here better early intervention services can be delivered to prevent homelessness in the first place whilst tailoring support to every individual.
Here our digital social prescribing software centralises all this information into one place as well as integrates across multiple third-party and clinical systems to better identify at-risk individuals to reduce time spent on admin and allow more time helping the citizens of your community.
For more information on how to make temporary housing more permanent to prevent homelessness across your local authority download our latest housing guide today.
Contact us now and let’s get started on digitally transforming your housing services to tackle homelessness face on to break the homelessness cycle for all citizens together.
