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Ending homelessness together
Place-based partnership working between local authorities and communities can help to prevent homelessness at a local level
HEALTH, CARE & SUPPORT
Georgia Leith
Senior Research and Evaluation Officer, Crisis
Georgia Leith
Senior Research and Evaluation Officer, Crisis
Issue 72 | July 2024
In 2018, Crisis set out a bold plan for evidence-based policy solutions to end homelessness in England, Scotland and Wales. National policy change is essential. However, this alone cannot achieve an end to homelessness. Local communities have a role to play in ending homelessness in their own areas.
Crisis wants to work with local authorities and other partners both inside and outside the homelessness and housing sectors to drive change and demonstrate that homelessness can be ended in local areas.
People at risk of, or experiencing homelessness, must navigate multiple systems to fulfil even their most basic needs (health, social care, housing, asylum, etc). To create profoundly better outcomes for people, there is a need for imaginative, bold, and ambitious responses to drive transformation that cuts across service and sector boundaries. People are affected by, and have an impact on, the places where they live. Social and physical environments impact health, wellbeing, and safety. Therefore, we need to think holistically and systemically to understand how systems impact on people’s lives.
“In order to make deep and durable progress on tough economic, social, and environmental issues, we must change the systems underlying those issues, the systems that keep them in place.”
Mark Cabaj, Evaluating Systems Change Results: An Inquiry Framework
Place-based partnerships
Over the past four years, Crisis Skylight Brent has worked towards place-based partnership working across the homelessness system in Brent, setting up a multi-agency Homelessness Forum, supporting two work streams on migrant homelessness and people with complex needs, and delivering a peer research project on vulnerable people’s access to online services such as making a homelessness application or managing housing benefit.
Generous support from the Berkeley Foundation has, since 2019, enabled Crisis Skylight Brent to continue building and developing new elements of its place-based work.
An independent evaluation conducted by Campbell Tickell in 2023 provided evidence of the impact place-based work in Brent was having on services and on beneficiaries. We learned through this evaluation that the efforts were strengthening relationships across the sectors and positively influencing ways of working; and that partners were able to work quicker and share relevant information more effectively across the borough.
“The success of these partnerships resulted in improvements for people experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness in Brent, while the evaluation showed cases of people’s housing issues being resolved more quickly.”
Partnership success
The success of these partnerships resulted in improvements for people experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness in Brent, while the evaluation showed cases of people’s housing issues being resolved more quickly and increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness successfully registering with a GP and receiving health assessments.
Furthermore, partners reported that fewer people were falling out of the system while moving between services in the area as a result of the partnerships; and that they were facing fewer barriers to resolving the housing issues of complex cases. The strength of relationships and senior leadership buy-in was key.
We are seeing the benefits of place-based partnership working in Brent play out. Crisis is furthering this approach in our Built for Zero programme, using a specialist methodology to build effective partnerships in other boroughs, and share data to end homelessness in their area. The evidence base continues to grow; with buy-in across the sectors and bolstered by support from large organisations and funding bodies, we know that homelessness can be ended, one area at a time.
