On Wednesday Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced her much anticipated Spending Review. There was a welcome focus on affordable housing and prevention, both of which are undeniably essential in ending homelessness, but is it enough?

To start on a positive note, we are very happy to see explicit focus on social and affordable housing with a £39 billion fund for a 10 year settlement of the affordable homes programme. 

This vote of confidence for social housing is an essential move in understanding that social housing is a sustainable way for people to have a secure exit route from homelessness. With the issues of not being able to move people on from temporary accommodation, rough sleeping, or unstable private rented sector housing that we face. Having more access to long-term and regulated social housing is a massive win. 

Prevention was also a pleasant surprise in the Spending Review. Barnabus has long supported that prevention is the way forward in ending homelessness. No matter how well or hard we work, we can only make a dent on homelessness without also stopping people coming to the streets in the first place. This will play out in the introduction of the Transformation Fund, with one of its focuses being the prevention of homelessness and rough sleeping through early intervention. This is a much needed step in recognising that homelessness is not a choice, but is a symptom of upstream system failure. 

The introduction of the Crisis and Resilience fund as an embedded, and long-term fund will ensure that there is an avenue of financial support that could mean the difference between a household becoming homeless or not. This offers a glimpse of how community-based, household-specific, flexible, and multi-disciplinary funding could be the way forward for prevention. 

We welcome this shift towards recognising that prevention stops the flow of people entering homelessness and is the way forward to reduce the need of expensive homelessness services, and to reduce the trauma that individuals face by going through homelessness. 

What’s missing?

The Spending Review has brought exciting focus to this sector, but there is still work to be done. 

Despite a really positive step to publicly commit to putting social housing at the forefront of housebuilding, there are still some assurances lacking that will make this endeavour truly accessible to the people we support. 

We are concerned that whilst by title affordable housing is positive, whether it will actually be affordable for the most financially vulnerable who need to rent that housing. Rent convergence and rent settlement has been announced in the Spending Review which ensures that housing associations will not be out of pocket for funding social housing. This protects the income of social housing providers and helps them to remain open and in operation. However there are little to no safeguards to define that ‘affordable’ housing actually stays within the realms of being affordable. This can lead to affordable social housing being unaffordable to those who need it most. We hope for there to be substantial residential and lived experience involvement in the conversation of what is to be considered affordable. 

There also is a worrying gap in the discussion of inclusive accessibility into social housing. A big push in the homeless sector is for more provision of supported housing, especially for those with complex needs due to trauma and homelessness that are often not included in typical descriptions of vulnerability. This spending review has not acknowledged that the pathway out of homelessness is not as simple as only providing more housing and making sure they are affordable enough. We are concerned that we do not see supported housing provision addressed in this review given the significant decline in available supported living spaces paired with the significant rise in complex vulnerabilities of individuals experiencing homelessness. 

One of our main asks of this review was for a substantial change in the homelessness funding system as a whole. While significant funding focus on homelessness is welcome, it still lacks a cohesive structure change to ensure that these funds are used effectively and not just plugging the funding gap that many local authorities face. We also hoped to see some focus on other homelessness funding that would recognise that ending homelessness is not just the supply of housing, but also supporting a wide network of services to be able to deliver high quality and sustainable support to people experiencing homelessness, especially those who do not qualify for local authority support. 

The spending review feels like a nudge in a positive direction that we now hope to see fully addressed in the homelessness strategy in Autumn. We are disappointed that this seems to have been relied on in lieu of addressing a much needed homelessness system overhaul in the spending review. The homelessness strategy will be headed up by the Ministry for Housing Community, and Local Government. This will likely invite other department players (DWP, health, justice, etc), but it will lack the power to be able to hold accountability over these departments than would have been possible at a higher level spending review.

This undermines the focus on prevention, because measures introduced in the spending review are a drop in the ocean in terms of what is needed for a true shift in prevention. A true shift in prevention would recognise the interlinked roots of homelessness such as mental health, poverty, physical health, employment support and much more. These involve all major public departments and would ensure a strategy and funding system that includes all major actors. However, we do not feel that this is what has taken place in this Spending review. 

Going forward…

Despite the unfortunate lack of changes that we needed to see within homelessness funding, there is still room for hope that something more substantial will come out of the homelessness strategy in Autumn. However, we welcome the hugely positive move towards social housing commitments as a safe and secure exit from homelessness and hope to feel tangible impacts in our service soon.