Author: Janice Higgins

Maggie Brunjes, Chief Executive of Homeless Network Scotland, on why we must commit to making it easier to end homelessness in Scotland.

Scotland is legally committed to everyone having a home to build and live their lives. But has so far lacked the systems – and in some places, resources – to achieve that. That’s the bottom line.

There can be few things in life as stressful as being homeless or at risk of losing your home. Some who experience it also encounter a system of services and information difficult to navigate, or even to locate.

All worsened by a pandemic, world events and a cost-of-living crisis creating global stress that will continue to impact at a local and personal level in ways that we probably still don’t fully understand. As 2022 was drawing to a close, the impact of this relentless stress on people who work in or around housing and homelessness was very clear.

When systems don’t work for people – they also severely affect the people working in the system.

So what needs to give?

To keep improving a system is to make it easier, better, faster, cheaper. And in that order.

That’s the accepted wisdom of world leading engineers adopted by experts on system improvement. The social sector, concerned with people and not products, is more complex, but we have plenty to gain from adopting a better method of improving local systems in ways that make it easier to put people first.

Specifically for the homelessness sector, we can recognise that starting at the end of this sequence – making it cheaper and faster – does not work, although we regularly see it attempted in ways that include:

• The market that has been allowed to underpin health and social care services pushing services to drop prices, to compete for new contracts or hold on to existing ones. A zero-sum game; cheaper, but not always better or even easier.  

• In some parts of the country, rough sleeping has been swapped for lives being lived out of hotel rooms or in unsuitable temporary accommodation. While the enormous efforts of local authority and third sector colleagues to hold firm significant reductions in rough sleeping should be lauded, we also know from experience that long periods in close quarters builds stress and fatigue, damages relationships and forces the hand around issues like risk and autonomy. And as a response, it’s neither easier, better, faster or cheaper.

• The cost and private profit reaped at the expense of lives in limbo. Year after year, the go-to providers of temporary accommodation in some places remain so because of the corner we’re backed into, and the difficulty managing a safe transition. Not easier or better, or cheaper.

• Uniformity. Poverty drives housing inequality and goes hand in hand with things like our age, our gender, our ethnicity. Increasing our collective knowledge and competence around equality, at policy, commissioning and practice level, can help us leave behind the blanket approaches that ultimately make lives harder. 

There is a constant call on the housing and homelessness sector to achieve ‘pace and scale’ to resolve the injustice of homelessness. Which is right – we do need pace, and we do need scale and across many fronts: in housing supply and access, in reducing the reliance on temporary accommodation.  In the responses that we know work, like rapid rehousing, Housing First, residential rehabilitation, cash-first autonomy. And we need pace and scale to resolve access to the services that are too hard to reach – like mental health services and to ensure no wrong door for people braving a range of challenges. Notably, we need pace and scale on all this because we understand these big actions to resolve homelessness will also prevent it, a virtuous cycle.

But it will take more than more houses to achieve pace and scale. To create the right conditions, we must also commit to making it easier for people working in the housing and homelessness sector.

How do we do that? Local Rapid Rehousing Transition Plans have been shown to be the right mechanism to chart a route away from over reliance on temporary accommodation, and towards earlier prevention. For 2023, we need to commit to:

Make it easier:

• Reach across sectors on the big questions of supply and demand for housing and services. There’s much to learn from each other, and solidarity we can provide each other.

• Prioritise and protect the time needed to build positive and trusted relationships – with people tapping into services, and across the range of professional relationships too.

• Trust the decision-making competence of people who support people – those who do it well need higher reward in pay, profile and influence.

• Call out when organisational self-interest and egotism is to the detriment of local outcomes. Those that are motivated for the wrong reasons are in the wrong place and will hold us back.

• Rethink paperwork, assessments, sharing data and attitudes to risk.

And make it better:

• Be guided by evidence and experience about what works and what matters most to people. Innovation is great, but the most evidenced and effective solutions to homelessness are intuitive and straightforward.

• Value more structured and facilitated conversations – creating spaces for shared learning with tight feedback loops to close the gap between policy intentions and what actually happens on the ground. Committees, taskforces, groups and subgroups have their place, but there are better environments to really learn and deliver together.

• Take collective responsibility to recognise and help the areas with the biggest challenges. How can we achieve cross authority approaches to better target knowledge, resources and infrastructure.

All things are difficult before they are easy. But combined, making our work easier and better provides the conditions for pace, scale and cost effectiveness.  From 2023, we must commit to making it easier to end homelessness and give each other a better chance of achieving progress at the pace and scale we want. By doing so, we will make it easier, better and faster for people facing a housing crisis too.

Homeless Network Scotland launched the first of a series of conversations that will continue through 2023. The growing pressure of the ‘permacrisis’ mobilised a wide range of voluntary action, in city centres and communities, to help people most affected. But with no benchmark or guidelines on delivering this – how can we be sure that doing good, is good enough? ‘The very best of intentions: when does good do harm?’ is intended to create the space for those that want to explore together the dilemmas and opportunities. Grant Campbell, Head of Partnerships and Consulting, welcomed over 40 people to the first conversation last week and blogs about his starting point for this big conversation.

My morning waking up routine, for more years than I can remember, has been to switch on the telly and watch Breakfast news. While probably not as productive as yoga or a morning run, it’s my routine. I’ve always felt that at the start of each day I wanted to be sighted on the news and current affairs, particularly since it can have a profound impact on the work that I do.

However, over the last couple of months something changed in my routine. I felt a genuine sense of hopelessness watching the news. Story after story leaving me more frustrated and disheartened about society. From war in Europe to fuel poverty, food insecurity, broken economy, unions striking, all part of our ‘cost of living crisis.’

To keep my sanity, I’ve switched to Channel 4 in the morning where they have reruns of ‘Cheers’. It feels a bit dated and at times it wanders into humour which shouldn’t have been acceptable in the 80’s, but it was. Anyway, it’s my escape.

Most news channels look for that ‘happy’ news story they can share each morning, and particularly over Christmas there is a search for ‘heart-warming’ stories to remind us how good people really are. There’s a focus on charitable work, the impact it has for good and how the viewing public can support it.

Take the example of those that work in and around the issue of homelessness in Scotland. While I’d argue that there is a lot of work to be done and we won’t rest until it’s ended (that’s possible by the way, but a conversation for another blog) the landscape has improved considerably. Rough sleeping figures in Glasgow and Edinburgh significantly down; evidence led work such as ‘Housing First’ becoming the norm; a prevention focus with new prevention duties; and defining what ‘unsuitable’ accommodation is and removing it from the system. We’ve seen the shift away from the need for winter night shelters with mattresses on the floor and a move to emergency welcome centres. If you want a more in-depth read into what’s changed over the last ten years here’s a journal from contributors across Scotland.

What was learned over decades is that what works for people who are homeless is what works for everyone. We all want a safe and secure home to live in, we want enough income to live, whether that’s benefits or salary, we want to be able to live, not just survive. We want to be as healthy as we can be, both physically and mentally. Finally, we want positive and supportive relationships around us.

Yet sometimes, a different approach is proposed for people who are homeless – sometimes its delivered, and sometimes it is even supported by politicians, businesses, the general public. Our new conversation series is to help cast some light on why good intentions are not enough when responding to big social challenges like poverty, social isolation and homelessness. And why, without the right knowledge and partnerships, good intentions can even cause harm.

We had a lively first conversation, with inputs from colleagues from Heriot-Watt university, Simon Community Scotland, Transform Community Development in Dundee and Help the Homeless Glasgow. We scratched the surface of the following themes, and committed to further developing each of them during 2023:

• Why is all ‘charity’ or voluntary action portrayed as positive, even those with low-bar standards?
• What happens when we centre the motivations of ‘givers’ over the impact on people receiving?
• Why do people use foodbanks, on-street soup kitchens or ask passers-by for money?  What are the alternatives?
• What do politicians do that helps – and hinders?
• How can the third sector lead on framing the issues to discourage the use of old tropes and stereotypes?
• How can we help voluntary action to be pioneering and trailblazing, rather than resurrecting old practices?

I find hope looking at what’s changed and a focus on what works. I think the context in a cost-of-living crisis can make this all harder – but it also raises the stakes. What we heard at the first conversation is real intention to build on what works and what matters. I hope to see you 2023 as this vital conversation develops. Contact me at grant@homelessnetwork.scot to get involved.