in England, Wales, and Scotland were required by legislation to produce local homelessness strategies and to review these at regular intervals. In Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the strategic housing authority, has responsibility for homelessness and it produced a
homelessness strategy in 2002 (NIHE, 2002). This is currently under review (see, for example, Gray and Long, 2009).
In England, Scotland and Wales, local authorities were required to undertake an assessment of homelessness and homelessness provision in their area and prepare and submit a strategy for preventing and alleviating all forms of homelessness amongst all groups (including single homeless people) in their area (Randall and Brown, 2006). Homelessness strategies were to be based upon a clear understanding of the extent and nature of homelessness in the local authority area, and of the resources available to address homelessness (Scottish Executive, 2002).
According to the guidance for England (Randall and Brown, 2002a) an effective homelessness strategy should:
• provide information on the scale and nature of homelessness in the area;
• identify the additional accommodation and support required to meet those needs; • identify the services needed to prevent
homelessness occurring or reoccurring; • identify the resources currently available to
meet these needs;
• identify additional resources as required; and
• involve other public voluntary and private agencies in partnership work.
3.4.1 ‘Joined up’ approaches to tackling homelessness
Policy documents and research had emphasised that helping homeless people
involved more than simply providing accommodation in a crisis situation. Earlier evaluations of the Rough Sleepers Initiatives (Randall and Brown, 1993 and 1996)
highlighted the importance of ‘move on’ support and ‘resettlement’ (see Chapters 2 and 6) involving a range of agencies, such as housing support services, drug and alcohol services, community mental health services and employment and training services. Such approaches had been successful in alleviating and preventing rough sleeping and were to be adopted in preventing and alleviating homelessness for all groups, though with particular emphasis on single people, as there was mounting evidence that many homeless families were not characterised by high support needs (Pleace et al, 2008). Guidance on developing homelessness strategies in England (Randall and Brown 2002a) emphasised the importance of
partnership working or ‘joined up’ approaches in tackling homelessness. This would result in higher quality and cost effective services, and was to be facilitated by:
• agreeing roles and responsibilities of all participating agencies from the outset; • improved information sharing of
information between agencies;
• joint training and visits between agencies; and
• an agreed individual officer or agency who will facilitate the process of joint work. In Scotland, recent guidance has stated that local homelessness strategies, together with housing support strategies, should be included in the Local Housing Strategy. In Wales, local authorities no longer have to produce separate homelessness or housing strategies. This resulted from concern over the resources consumed by the strategic planning process which has been rationalised so that the number of strategies produced for the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) by local authorities has been reduced from 32 to just four.8 Although the WAG’s Statutory
Guidance on producing Community Strategies cites housing as one area that can contribute to all of these plans there is no mention of homelessness in the guidance (Clapham
et al, 2009). WAG has a National Housing Strategy (WAG, 2005) and is currently
developing a 10 year National Homelessness Plan but there are concerns that the move away from separate local homelessness strategies may result in local authorities placing less importance on the prevention of homelessness. In England, a number of National Indicators (introduced by the previous administration) cover homelessness including NI 141 (the number of vulnerable people achieving independent living); NI 142 (the number of people who are supported to maintain independent living) and NI 146 (the number of households living in temporary accommodation) (CLG, 2007b). The Coalition Government has recently announced
that National Indicators and Local Area Agreements are to be abolished as central government devolves more responsibility to local authorities as part of its localism agenda. 3.4.2 The impact of homelessness
strategies
Key stakeholders’ views on the effectiveness and impact of local homelessness strategies were mixed. Overall they believed that the requirement for local authorities to take more responsibility for homelessness, to review provision, to adopt a more strategic response and then to review progress, was a positive development. Key stakeholders from both the statutory and non-statutory sector felt that the requirement had also led to improvements in partnership working as was intended, as statutory and non-statutoryagencies were required to work together both to develop the strategies and to deliver them. In particular, a number of key stakeholders felt that this had resulted in new or improved working relations between local authorities and voluntary sector groups working with single homeless people whilst others felt that they had helped to improve understanding of homelessness.
I would say the step change around about that time in terms of partnership working, because local authorities and partners were almost sort of required to work together, and in a sense the local authorities were able to use the legislation to try and, in some sense, bring in other partners who may have been more reluctant previously.
(Key stakeholder, statutory sector) However, other key stakeholders felt that some local authorities had not taken their responsibilities seriously, and the production of homelessness strategies had done
little to improve relations between local authorities and other statutory and non- statutory providers. They also believed that homelessness strategies had tended to focus on priority groups (families with children and young people) and, in some areas, the most visible form of homelessness, rough sleeping, rather than on single homeless people more generally.