Introduction

Homeless Link is the national membership organisation for frontline homelessness agencies in England and Wales. Our mission is to act as a catalyst to bring about an end to homelessness.

Homeless Link’s member organisations provide services through a range of services from hostels and day centres to drug and alcohol services and church groups.

We work in close collaboration with our members, partners and with national, regional and local government in London to:

• combat the causes of homelessness
• provide high quality and innovative services to help people move on to settled accommodation and
• work to reduce the risk of new people falling into homelessness.

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the ALG’s Supporting People (SP) Strategy on behalf of our members in London. Homeless Link is an active member of the ALG’s SP Strategic Forum and we have been closely involved with the work of SP teams in several key London boroughs. We believe there is a need for robust leadership on SP at a regional level in London to address and prevent homelessness.

Overall, we would encourage the ALG to enable cross-borough and partnership working which will empower individual homeless people to access appropriate support services when and where required. We would emphasise the need to link this Strategy with the wide range of other strategies which impact upon homelessness service provision, and to ensure that the goals and targets of these are complementary. We urge the ALG to support our call for a London Homelessness Strategy with a pan-London vision to build upon the work of existing local homelessness strategies.

It is common for homeless people to change location frequently, moving between London boroughs for many different reasons, for example to access suitable services or escape violent relationships. The challenge for local authorities’ SP officers is to work effectively across borough boundaries to ensure that SP generates support for homeless people as and when they are ready to take it up. Furthermore, appropriate support services should be strategically located across boroughs according to need.

Current service provision has evolved to cater for cross-authority needs but, as budgets are reduced, it is vital that local authorities consult one another during their service reviews before de-commissioning or re-modelling cross-authority projects. Without coordination such changes risk producing gaps in the provision of pan-London services, gaps which could impact the very cross-authority groups this Strategy identifies as being in greatest need of support.

We welcome the Strategy’s commitment to map SP services across London as this will better enable commissioning officers to coordinate supply to match demand. We may then identify where low demand for existing specialist projects in one area may be augmented by cross-borough referrals. Taking a pan-London view of services may save money and time by making an existing project viable rather than developing new build in a neighbouring authority. It is essential that local authorities are supported and encouraged to continue to host cross-authority services, otherwise there is a real risk of vital services being forced out of boroughs which are reluctant to take responsibility for hosting them.

Monitoring access to services for vulnerable, cross-authority client groups is not addressed in the Strategy. We call upon the ALG to put mechanisms in place to track any decline in the ability of providers to provide for service users with no local connection.

Homeless Link’s Coalition on Older Homeless People Project has found too little support for older people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. We see this Strategy as an opportunity for more creative commissioning of new services focussed on older people and we welcome the emphasis on partnership working to provide these.

Addressing the issue of move-on is fundamental to the effectiveness of SP-funded projects. Without adequate and appropriate move-on opportunities, hostels and supported housing will remain silted-up, preventing them from offering timely access to services for those most in need. Our report No Room to Move? sets out a series of achievable targets for local authorities. The ALG should encourage all local authorities in London to work towards these targets in their own SP strategies.

The Strategy identifies joint commissioning, remodelling of services, building choice and capacity as the key issues for London – are these the right priorities?

Mapping of existing services will enable us to gain a true picture of the range of provision across the capital and to match this with local need. This clarification is essential to planning remodelled of services.

The Housing Corporation should be encouraged to fund remodelling of services. In many cases remodelling existing projects may be a more efficient use of resources than building entirely new services.

We welcome the focus on joint commissioning of services as an opportunity to ensure that a broad range of important services remain viable, such as those responding to mental health needs. Across London a range of hostels provide accommodation for homeless people (often rough sleepers) with mental health problems. Many of these were cross-authority services established under the Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) and the Homeless Mentally Ill Initiative (Hmii) and local authorities understandably want to ensure that they are able to access these resources for local people. However, as there are not hostels with such specialisms in every borough, it may make sense to view some of these as regional resources and to ensure that reviews and value for money exercises take account of this.

Is the move to floating support services (where appropriate for service users) right?

Floating support can fulfill a useful role, enabling some service users to move out of hostels and live more independently in social or private-rented sector housing. However, such services should be developed with the needs of the individual in mind rather than the preferences of funders and providers. Floating support is not an appropriate option for many formerly homeless people and should be used only when an individual is ready to live more independently. If vulnerable people are moved out of supported accommodation and into floating support too soon there is a real risk of tenancy failure. Setting people up to fail in their own tenancies only serves to exacerbate the problem of repeat and entrenched homelessness.

Although floating support services may appear to offer a lower unit cost to commissioning officers, it would not prove cost-effective to provide more intensive, long-term floating support to individuals with more complex needs and over a number of sites.

Homeless Link urges the ALG to consider the important role played by London’s day centres in providing support to homeless people on a daily basis. Day centres are vital tools in supporting tenancies and promoting the health and welfare of many homeless and formerly homeless people and yet many rely on precarious and multiple packages of funding. We would urge the ALG to promote the funding of day services by local authorities under SP.

Strengthening links with primary care trusts and youth offender teams are vital. What other agencies are important for the achievement of the Strategy?

Links with local authorities’ SP strategies are vital. Although this Strategy does not seek to replicate local strategies it does build upon their work and it would be helpful for local authorities to recognise the goals of the ALG’s SP Strategy in their own future work.

Links with the Probation Service and the police would help to ensure consistent and valuable through-care is provided for the cross-authority groups identified. Similarly, strong links with drug and alcohol service providers are essential to the success of the integrated treatment and housing pathway detailed in the Strategy.

There is a need to engage mental health services in the work of former Hmii/RSI services and to ensure that health commissioners recognise that this specialist form of accommodation is maintaining people with a whole range of mental health problems. More support from health commissioning is essential if these services are going to continue to work with vulnerable and often chaotic people.

What are the priorities for capital investment in developing services in London?

Being unable to guarantee revenue funding for SP projects currently prevents many service providers from bidding for capital funds available through the ADP. Without guaranteed revenue funding, capital for new-build schemes is inaccessible and new developments are stifled. This has a serious impact on the sector’s ability to respond to need.

The London Housing Strategy has identified the need for additional supported housing across London. While we would support this goal we also believe existing supported housing is silted up and that there is an urgent need to identify appropriate move-on options from supported housing. This move-on may not be into social housing- the London Housing Strategy and the ALG’s SP Strategy both recognise there is the need to establish which client groups social housing is appropriate for.

It is essential that this Strategy is fully integrated with the ODPM’s capital programme so as to complement its work to improve hostels. This is especially pertinent where temporary closures to hostels in one borough may cause service users to be decanted across boroughs to other appropriate services. In addition, where hostels receive capital funding for re-modeling we would wish to see evidence that some thought has been given to whether the hostels is or may become a cross-authority service.

Is there unmet need for any BME specific cross-authority projects in your area?

Homeless Link believes that both training by and partnership working with specialist BME projects would enable more service providers to reach some of the culturally diverse groups in London. Existing BME projects must be able to maintain their cross-authority referrals as the specialist support they offer may service significant pan-London rather than local need.

Specialist frequently means small. Many of the organisations working most effectively with harder-to-reach homeless people lack the financial and human resources to attend multiple meetings and prepare written responses and as a result they may be excluded from contributing fully to consultations. For smaller agencies the paperwork involved in SP funding also constitutes a disproportionate burden. Homeless Link urges the ALG to recognise the excellent work often done by smaller agencies and to call upon SP officers to seek out and support these organisations.

Are the commitments for each of the cross-authority clients groups the right ones?

Services for these groups of people are often politically unpopular and therefore risk losing out on SP funding commissioned on a borough basis.

The voluntary sector underpins the delivery of services for homeless people and as such should be consulted on the provision of cross-authority services. A cross-authority providers’ forum should be established to link in to the SP Strategic Forum and include frontline and second tier organisations. This would enable future pan-London SP work to be planned in a more consultative way from the start and the SP Forum would develop a good understanding of providers and other second tier organisations, particularly those working with the cross-authority client groups identified in the Strategy, such as Refuge.

Beyond the groups identified it is essential that we maintain our awareness of the needs of other cross-authority client groups, such as refugees and asylum seekers, travellers and Roma. Other client groups may not fit neatly into the categories identified and we would like to see some commitment to working in a flexible way, recognising the need for occasional mobility for individuals with other kinds of need.

Summary

Homeless Link welcomes this Strategy as an important step towards developing a coherent London-wide support structure for homeless people. This Strategy presents a real opportunity to coordinate services and develop a network of provision in response to need. We call upon the ALG to set challenging goals for local authorities and to focus its Strategy upon the needs of individuals over and above the technical considerations of cross-borough working.

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