Tackling homelessness is one of the most challenging issues facing councils in Britain.
For many people homelessness is synonymous with rough sleeping, but it is a much larger issue than that. Most homeless people are not sleeping rough but are housed in temporary accommodation – such as Ipswich Borough Council’s West and East Villa homeless families’ units – while they wait for a permanent home.
Even more people, threatened with losing their home, are helped every month by the Council to stop them becoming homeless in the first place.
A great deal of largely hidden effort is put in to stop people ending up on the streets which is why the surveys of rough sleeping regularly undertaken in Ipswich have consistently put the number of people in single figures for several years now.
Concentrating on prevention is not only much better for the individuals involved but is also much cheaper. Because, once someone has ended up sleeping rough, it can be very expensive to provide them with the support they need to get off the streets.
It is not simply a case of giving them a house.
People who end up sleeping rough often have multiple and complex needs. There can be a combination of mental, psychological or emotional health needs, dependency on drugs and alcohol, physical health issues, and experience of domestic violence or abuse.
These issues, especially after an extended period of sleeping rough, can make an individual extremely ill-equipped to sustain a housing tenancy. This can make landlords very reluctant to take on someone who has been sleeping rough.
Programmes in the past have worked with people who have been sleeping rough to try to get them into better patterns of behaviour so that they could hold down a tenancy. The problem is that this creates a Catch 22 situation where the lack of a stable home prevents establishing those behaviours, which in turn means that they can’t access a stable home.
This is where “Housing First” comes in.
This is an internationally recognised approach to supporting homeless people with high needs and histories of entrenched or repeated rough sleeping.
Its overall philosophy is to provide a stable, independent home to individuals without any preconditions about “housing readiness” and then to work with them to ensure they can keep it.
This is provided by intensive, tailored, one-to-one support that is extremely flexible, making the service fit the individual rather than the individual fit the service. Caseloads for the support workers are deliberately kept low so they can be persistent and proactive, doing “whatever it takes” and not giving up if the going gets tough.
This personalised support enables a group of people to be helped who have not been successfully engaged and supported by other housing services due to the level and complexity of their needs. Evidence suggests that, over time, those housed by Housing First require less support from services and, in some cases, may no longer require support.
In Ipswich we have been delivering a Housing First project since 2018 with one-bedroomed houses being provided by Ipswich Borough Council and Newtide and Orwell Housing Associations.
In total 30 people have been helped by Housing First with 20 tenancies currently supported.
We believe this has played a significant role in cutting the number of people sleeping rough in Ipswich which reached a high of 27 in 2017. This was reduced to as low as 3 in November 2021 before a recent rise caused by the cost of living crisis.
That’s why Ipswich Borough Council’s Executive Committee voted unanimously last week to continue funding Housing First for at least another four years and to develop the service further, for example by setting up a peer support group so that advice and mutual support can be provided by people who are going through the same experiences.
By continuing this vital project our hope is that not only can we get people off the streets, but that we can help to keep them off the streets for good.