Two Change Leads from All in for Change, Amanda Rutherford and David Pentland, share their reflections on facilitating the national roadshow.
In helping to produce ‘Taking the Temperature’, the latest report from the All in for Change roadshow, we held workshops and focus groups across Scotland to find out more about the current reality of the homelessness system. We were delighted to engage with more than 100 people working in homelessness and using homelessness services and we owe our heartfelt thanks to those who took the time to come along and share their views on working or being cared for in many different homelessness settings.
What was apparent in every conversation was a mixed bag of participants with lots of sectors represented and common themes emerged when we talked about challenges, such as the well-known challenge frontline workers and people experiencing homelessness face when services don’t interact with each other. A particular example that we heard in many different places was the lack of connection between mental health, addiction, and homelessness services.
We also made sure to hear about the good stuff – the more we talked with different people, in different places, the more we learned about the brilliant work currently taking place.
Whether that’s Aberdeenshire’s use of remote appointments to remove barriers to people making homelessness applications, or South Ayrshire’s approach to providing wrap-around support in Housing First, we found examples of inspirational work taking place all over Scotland.
In Edinburgh, Cyrenians are running a hospital in-reach programme with the NHS to help patients and staff navigate the homelessness system and prevent discharge into homelessness, while in Kilmarnock, a wellbeing unit within the police is focusing on early intervention, to tackle the root causes of homelessness.
The list could go on and on – there just isn’t space to cover them all in one blog. But while there are countless examples of good practice taking place at present, it is also clear that many of these projects do not get the recognition they deserve. That means, all too often, good practice in one area is not replicated in another.
In that context, it is vital we coordinate – that we work together, to learn from each other – to move towards more joined up services, where good practice in one area inspires the same quality of delivery in another. It is also vital that people with experience of homelessness drive this change.
Because listening to people with experience of the homelessness system can never be an after-thought. People with lived experience of homelessness, and those with expertise from delivering frontline services, must play a central role in mobilising plans for ending homelessness.
The homelessness system needs to work for the people who need it. That means we need to make services more streamlined, with better links between different sectors – such as health, justice and housing – as well.
If we do that, we can build a system that works for everyone.
The full Taking the Temperature report can be found here.
All in for Change are recruiting new members! If you want to be part of this team, using your experience to collaborate with decision-makers and engaging with people using and providing services, get in touch for an application pack – changeteam@homelessnetwork.scot
Read this reflection from Change Lead Pedro Cameron on joining the All in for Change Team, the importance of partnership working and his priorities as a Change Lead.
As Engagement Lead for the Homeless Housing Options Scotland (HHOS) project, it’s important for me to make sure that me and my project are connecting with the sector as far and wide as possible. Partnership working, and joined up approaches are, in my view, essential to delivering effective homelessness services. Another crucial thread to this is the input and participation of those with lived experience. All In For Change is a prime example of how this approach can work.
I have worked for Housing Options Scotland for over 7 years now, and in 2021 we launched our HHOS project – marking a move from our usual housing advice service into one that can offer emergency advice and support to disabled people, older people and members of the Armed Forces community who find themselves in housing crisis.
During my first two years working on HHOS, I became more and more aware of the work that All In For Change was doing through various online events, and through talking to people involved, and I was always impressed by the knowledge and wisdom shared by its members. I eventually attended in person one of the All In For Change Roadshow events in 2022 – and while in that room I was finally convinced to join the team.
Collaboration and connection are key to ending homelessness One of my key priorities in the role has been establishing ways that we can work together with our clients, other organisations, local authorities and the government to help to ensure that there are positive relationships between all involved in the homelessness process. I think that the key to this is collaboration and connection.
Being part of the Change Team, and the wide range of people who work on it, fits in perfectly with that aim. Everyone involved with All In For Change is dedicated to ending homelessness, and there is a great sense of community, with a shared goal, which I believe should be the way the whole sector works together.
Highlighting hidden homelessness – with a focus on equality, diversity and inclusion
There are a few other priorities that I wish to bring to, and enhance within the Change Team. As a housing professional, who has themselves experienced homelessness, it is extremely beneficial to be on a team which marries lived experience with professional experience. When I was homeless in my late teens, sleeping at a friend’s in a cupboard under the stairs, I had no idea that I actually qualified as homeless.
I am passionate about perceptions of homelessness, who can be affected by it, and what it actually looks like. At HHOS, the majority of our clients are not roofless, and are actually what we would consider as “hidden homeless”. I think it’s important that those voices are heard too.
Finally, I am extremely passionate about equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility in homelessness. Those with protected characteristics are more likely to experience homelessness, and experience additional barriers, so it makes sense for us to look more closely at the impact of that. It’s really important to me that minority groups are considered at every part of service design and delivery, and not retrofitted.
I have spent a lot of my professional life working in this field and I want to bring that to the Change Team and make sure the experiences of protected groups are heard and considered in the fight to end homelessness.
All In For Change is going to be instrumental in making sure homelessness is ended, and I’m delighted that I get to be involved in the team.
All in for Change are recruiting new members! If you want to be part of this team, using your experience to collaborate with decision-makers and engaging with people using and providing services, get in touch for an application pack – changeteam@homelessnetwork.scot
A summary of the key themes from a webinar hosted by Homeless Network Scotland on 21 February 2023 which was attended by over 120 colleagues from 19 local authorities, from the NHS, health and social care partnerships, housing associations, academia and the third sector.
In a cost-of-living crisis with rising homelessness, confirmation that the new homelessness prevention duties will be included in the housing bill in the second half of 2023 provides some much-needed optimism – or at least anticipation.
Homeless Network Scotland are among those who have been involved at different stages in the development of the duties and we are strongly committed to ensuring that as many people as possible are consulted and briefed on the duties and their implications.
The purpose of ‘The Big Ask: acting now to prevent homelessness’ webinar was to update on the expected timeline of the duties. And further, to explore what more can be done now to prevent homelessness by learning from 3 important insights – lived experience, the third sector, local places.
1. Prevention: what did the Christie Commission say?
The christie commission is a rare example of a report that both unified and articulated a diverse range of perspectives about the future delivery of public services. Published over a decade ago, it still reads as if it was an analysis of today. On prevention, the christie commission said:
The adoption of preventative approaches, in particular approaches which build on the active participation of service users and communities, will contribute significantly to making the best possible use of money and other assets.
Such approaches will help to eradicate duplication and waste and, critically, take demand out of the system over the longer term.
Maximise scarce resources by utilising all available resources from the public, private and third sectors, individuals, groups and communities.
The webinar was opened in this context, with the package presented reaching across these themes.
2. Prevention of Homelessness: what type?
With such a wide range of activity potentially contributing to preventing homelessness, an organising framework – the 5-Stage Typology of Homelessness Prevention – was developed by colleagues at Heriot-Watt and Cardiff universities and which defines activity as follows:
The prevention of homelessness duties, combined with existing homelessness duties, would span stages 2-5. The learning presented and themes discussed in this webinar span the same stages 2-5.
3. What is expected in the Housing Bill?
The prevention duties will be included in the housing bill which is expected to be published in the second half of 2023 with the intention to strengthen housing rights and to include:
Wider public bodies to ‘ask and act’ about housing situations.
Local authorities to take reasonable steps to prevent homelessness (with the steps set out in either secondary legislation or statutory guidance).
Referrals from public bodies to be treated as an application for assistance by the local authority.
Window for homelessness risk extended from 2 to 6 months.
Aligning homelessness assessment with prevention assessment, recognising households may balance between both.
Changes to the definition of domestic abuse and the need for social landlords to have a domestic abuse policy.
Assessment of housing support needs to be included in local homelessness strategy and/or Local Housing Strategy.
4. Three key insights…
The webinar welcomed the insights from lived experience, the third sector and from local places on what works to prevent homelessness. This was invited from:
(i) Learning From Lived Experience
Shea Moran, who represented the Change Team, reflected on the work of their Prevention Commission, which shaped the recommendations of the Prevention Review Group’s final report. Shea articulated the importance of ensuring through the new duties that people who experience or are at risk of homelessness, especially young people, do not have expectations or responsibilities on them that do not apply to other members of the public.
(ii) Learning From the Third Sector
Pauline Kerrigan from The National Lottery Community Fund shared the learning from the fund’s strategic investment in homelessness which was intended to respond to their own findings that homelessness is a priority at local level, while complementing a strategic priority for government. Uniquely, the process included peer review across the applicants so that the issues most important to the sector as a whole could be funded.
(iii) Learning From Local Places
Andy Peline from SWAMP reflected on his involvement with the Staying In programme which took a place-based approach to preventing homelessness. In this project, popular community organisations who were not ‘homelessness’ organisations were invited to ‘Ask and Act’: to ask about housing, and to act to prevent homelessness where there was a risk. Andy shared how this was done at point of initial contact and that mirroring the prevention duties informally at community level was very effective at preventing homelessness.
All homelessness starts in a community, which means that local places can play a pivotal role to help prevent it. However the risk of homelessness is not equal, with some people and places more affected than others. Places that are most affected also need to see more progress in the bigger factors that create homelessness. Preventing homelessness starts here:
5. … and six key themes from discussion
Some of us will have an enhanced duty to prevent homelessness. Some of us will have a new duty to prevent homelessness. And some of us will have no specific duty – but want to help. The following key themes emerged from the feedback that was shared in the breakout rooms:
The ‘Ask and Act’ duties were coined by the prevention commission and so are well informed by what people closest to the issues, people with lived experience and frontline responsibilities, think will work best to prevent homelessness earlier.
We need a strong balance that focuses on both parts of the duties, ask and act. In many cases, the public sector will need to act after asking about housing. In other cases and at earlier stages, a household can be enabled to act to resolve their own housing situation. Routine enquiry and a supportive line of questions will maximise that outcome – asking the right questions sensitively to get to the root of the problem. Guidance and training will be key.
Although the duty to ask and act will not be on communities and community-based organisations, it will be important to encourage a local role to prevent homelessness earlier and closer to home. As well as the range of local groups and services that people connect with, communities host housing activists, community champions, connectors and others with an interest in local housing who want to be involved in preventing homelessness in their area.
It has been demonstrated that good outcomes are possible when subject experts (on housing and homelessness) collaborate with local experts and people with lived experience to problem solve at a local level. Adopting a place-based approach to preventing homelessness means connecting with existing community groups and networks to help identify housing issues earlier. This can be a simple two step approach of asking about housing and acting on what people tell you – mirroring the prevention duties.
Cementing preventing homelessness as a priority outcome in Local Outcomes Improvement Plans can help non-statutory and place-based approaches to branch out right across communities in Scotland. LOIPs are the mechanism by which Community Planning Partnerships deliver improved outcomes for their communities.
Preventing homelessness will be radically more cost-effective in the longer term. But the potential will be limited if the transition is not resourced properly in the short-to-medium term. This can also harness the enthusiasm for prevention more widely, with some services already reshaping and shifting towards a more upstream approach in anticipation of the new duties.
Should housing associations, membership bodies and other organisations within the sector be looking to increase diversity among staff and board teams? Why is it important? And what resources are available for those looking to attract a broader range of backgrounds and experiences?
Joining this podcast are Lara Oyedele, the current president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, who is seeking to raise awareness of the importance of racial diversity within the leadership of the housing sector with her CIH presidential campaign, ‘In My Shoes’, Callum Chomczuk, the national director for CIH Scotland and chair of the internal EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) group which for the past two years has been working to improve EDI throughout CIH and its membership, and Fash Fasoro, the CEO of social enterprise DataKirk. Fash helped organise the recent Scottish Black Talent Summit and offers insight on how to improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
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.
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