Implementation needs to be at the heart of our approach to ending homelessness, says Robin White.
Building a progressive system in which homelessness is rare, brief, and non-repeated is an ambition shared by organisations and individuals working in housing across Wales. It’s something that sits at the heart of Welsh Government’s own Ending Homelessness Action Plan and it’s something that’s central to Shelter Cymru’s commitment to the Fight for Home.
However, we know turning ambition into reality is challenging. And right now, the housing emergency in Wales often appears to be worsening rather than improving.
We see this starkly in the latest Welsh homelessness figures, with an 8 per cent increase in the number of households owed a duty to help secure accommodation. We see it in the stubbornly high number of people – more than 11,000 – trapped in temporary accommodation at a cost of £95 million a year. And we see it at Shelter Cymru in the numbers of people that turn to us every day for help, with 1 in every 109 households in Wales contacting us for support last year.
And behind these statistics are people’s lives. Lives blighted by a housing emergency that negatively impacts, health, wellbeing and education. We hear time and time again about people forced to live miles from schools and support networks, families crammed into single rooms and people whose mental health is suffering because of the situation they are trapped in. And this reality of our housing system is something we’ve recently highlighted in a joint report with the Bevan Foundation – Nowhere to Call Home (see p9) – in which we looked at the impact a lack of safe, secure, suitable, and genuinely affordable homes has had on the growth in temporary accommodation and on the lives of those living there.
Yet challenges like these sit against a backdrop of years of welcome effort by Welsh Government to drive improvements including the extension of priority need to rough sleepers, increased security of tenure for private renters, and a clear commitment to delivering new social homes.
These changes are all ones Shelter Cymru has supported, and indeed campaigned for, and we believe they have helped advance the Fight for Home and left Wales in a more socially just nation than it otherwise would be. However, as we look ahead to highly anticipated new homelessness legislation it is also important to reflect on what is needed to ensure that progressive policy and legislation has maximum effect. Learning from what has been done so far and asking the question of how we ensure new legislation works in practice.
At Shelter Cymru we believe answering this means:
- Providing local authorities – and other public sector bodies – with the resources necessary to implement change. We know that a lack of capacity is already a challenge, and taking further steps without additional resource or financial support may risk adding only more pressure onto an overstretched system.
- Providing training to local authorities and public sector bodies to fully understand new legislation and their role in delivering it. In our advice services at Shelter Cymru we work with many committed and knowledgeable professionals, but we also encounter many who aren’t fully aware of current policy and legislation. Through our training team we work to address this and to ensure all those working in housing and homelessness have the knowledge they need. With significant legislative changes, there will be a responsibility on Welsh Government to support that upskilling.
- Developing a wider strategy for ending the housing emergency in Wales, one that identifies the links between different policy areas. One clear example of this being the importance of linking a drive towards a more progressive homelessness environment with the delivery of new social homes. Recognising that without an increase in the supply of these, and the right allocations policies, the impact of legislation is inevitably limited.
We are fortunate in Wales to have had successive governments that are committed to social justice. The legislative and policy shifts we’ve seen in recent years demonstrate that, as do the commitments we expect to see in future legislation. Making sure these changes are effective though needs a whole system approach to ending homelessness and the housing emergency in Wales. All which must ultimately be underpinned by the introduction of a legal right to adequate housing that would ensure implementation of legislation is fully considered when it is developed.
Robin White is head of campaigns at Shelter Cymru