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Survey of Needs and Provision (SNaP)
What's new on SNAP?
SNAP IS BEING REPEATED IN 2008/09 - Click here to go to the new page
A new initiative
Homeless Link and the Resource Information Service (RIS) have jointly developed new research that maps the sector providing services to single people or couples who are homeless in England.
You may yourself have found that it is difficult to get a picture of what services for homeless are like in England. The lack of this information means that it is more difficult to argue for funding allocations for homelessness services, adequately support providers to develop their services and to showcase the excellent work that goes on in our sector.
Funded by Communities and Local Government (CLG) and CRASH, the research uncovers substantial amounts of data on services provided by day centres, bed spaces and “episodes” of use in hostels and other accommodation, the support needs of clients accessing homelessness services and how these services are funded.
Findings
We have produced two documents with the findings of the Survey of Needs and Provision:
- A summary of findings - which pulls together the key findings and recommendations of the research
- A full report which gives greater detail on the different types of service provision in England, regional breakdowns of provision and the full results of the survey.
For a copy of the full report or summary of findings, please go to the SNAP download page
Key findings
Whilst the figures do not give an overall number of homeless people, they show the level of demand placed on homelessness services – 118,000 people coming through them every year.
- There are 187 day centres in England, provided by 171 providers, seeing on average 10,000 people a day. They deal with very vulnerable people, but are heavily dependent on charitable fundraising
- There are more than 50,000 bed spaces supporting homeless people in England
- There are 246 direct access hostels in England
The report shows that homelessness agencies are working with some of the most socially excluded individuals in our society. The majority of services estimate that most of the people they work with have multiple problems, for example drug and alcohol issues, mental health problems, benefits and debt problems.
While the government is doing much excellent work with homelessness, these complex and vulnerable individuals are being failed by a number of services:
- There is a link between the lack of settled accommodation and criminal behaviour. One fifth of projects report the majority of the people using their services were prison leavers. This group is present in the majority of homelessness services yet only 3% of services reported receiving any funding from criminal justice sources.
- Support for education, training and employment is less commonly available than other types of advice and support. Only 5% of projects reported any level of funding from employment and education agencies
Methodology
This research project brings together and makes publicly available data on single homeless people and couples in England from:
- The national database of housing related support services for a range of vulnerable groups, including homeless people, which is funded by the government’s Supporting People programme.
- Homeless UK, an online national database of accommodation and non-residential homelessness and related services, funded by Communities and Local Government (CLG) and published by RIS.
Analysis of these existing datatsets was complemented by a telephone survey of 151 projects.
Note that statutory homelessness figures and data from official street counts were not included in the analysis. However, there is a great deal of overlap between different data sets, including official statistics. Individuals accessing SP funded accommodation, could also have been accepted as homeless by local authorities, been counted during street counts and be accessing the support available in day centres.
The research focused on day centres and accommodation based services for single homeless people and couples, including both direct access/emergency hostels and second stage supported accommodation.
PRESS RELEASE : Read our press release about the Survey of Needs and Provision
Contact
If you have any questions about the research please just contact Rachel Prime at Homeless Link on 020 7960 3018. .. Rachel Prime: rachel.prime@homelesslink.org.uk.