You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Shift homelessness funding from crisis response to prevention, say ALMOs
Homelessness budgets should be shifted to focus on prevention measures rather than crisis response, the National Federation of ALMOs (NFA) has said.
In a new report by NFA, the body has said more funding should be put to the areas that ensure people do not end up on the streets in the first place. This includes removing benefit and Local Housing Allowance caps, providing targeted funding initiatives to employment initiatives and undertaking a significant escalation in the development of truly affordable social homes.
The group urged the government to facilitate the delivery of 100,000 new social rented homes a year with “guaranteed wrap-around support for those who need it to prevent further homelessness”.
Expensive, insecure private tenancies and a lack social housing supply means that for those at risk of homelessness or already homeless, finding somewhere to live is “a constant and increasingly unwinnable battle”, the report said.
As a result, the report added, councils must fulfil their statutory duties to relieve homelessness by placing households in costly privately owned temporary accommodation, which “swallows funding for the preventative work that would offer much better value for money”.
The report, which focuses on the experiences of 11 ALMOs’ homelessness services, also calls on the government to scrap so-called no-fault Section 21 evictions, permanently lift the Local Housing Allowance rate and remove “built-in homelessness triggers”, such as the benefit cap, from the welfare system.
READ MORE
It also demands for a commitment to long-term funding for homelessness prevention and relief strategies, including for Housing First projects.
At the end of March, there were 93,000 households in temporary accommodation in England, including 129,380 children.
Councils spent £1.1bn on temporary accommodation between April 2018 and May 2019.
In 2018/19, 6,338 new homes for social rent were completed.
The NFA report also set out lessons from ALMOs’ work on the ‘Everyone In’ programme, which saw rough sleepers or those at risk of rough sleeping given emergency accommodation at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
It said that many of those housed were sofa surfing or in insecure homes and so were not previously known to ALMOs’ homelessness services.
For instance, Doncaster Council’s St Leger Homes assisted around 400 people despite having a rough sleeper count of around 27.
Most of those given emergency accommodation were single people or childless couples, the report said, with many unable to access benefits because of their migration status.
Councils have been able to stake a snapshot of their homeless populations and form closer relationships with other services through their Everyone In work, it added, but people are still presenting as homeless as the causes remained unsolved.
