One afternoon in September 2018, I chaired a seminar for an embryonic organisation working on homelessness.  It had long been an issue close to my heart – I’d been chairing Hackney Winter Night Shelter for four years, and a trustee in another national charity, and I could have done more of that sort of thing.  But there was something different about this new start-up: the focus on the use of evidence, the sense of its place in the ecosphere, the drive to make a difference.  So when the permanent Chair role came up soon afterwards, I applied.

As I leave six and a half years later, there are a few moments which stick in the mind which symbolise for me the development of the organisation, from those start-up days to today when we have 30 staff, an established reputation, and a role leading a £15m government-funded research programme with several dozen partners.

First, in May 2019, meeting in the offices of COSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities) in Edinburgh, we agreed our first strategy.  It was a lively process, rightly.  The Chief Executive, Ligia Teixeira, had ideas, I had ideas, board members had ideas.  Eventually, we coalesced around three strands of work: Making evidence accessible and filling the gaps; Supporting data and evidence to be applied in practice; and Mobilise a learning culture.  I talked about the progress - and what else there is to do - in all three in an earlier blog. 

By the time conferences began again after Covid, we had established relationships with dozens of local authorities, and with the (now) Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I felt particularly proud at a conference in Central Hall, Westminster, in early June 2022. The Minister for Homelessness, Eddie Hughes (who knew his stuff as a former manager at YMCA Birmingham), spoke very positively about the Centre, but what struck me just as much was the number of local authority managers who had come along to engage in and learn from our work on data.

Only a couple of weeks later, we held our annual Impact Forum in my native city of Birmingham. This showed the Centre’s links expanding in a number of ways.  We had senior politicians, in Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands, and Sharon Thompson, Cabinet Member for Housing and Homelessness at the City Council.  But we also had speakers with lived experience, campaigners from local charities, including a particularly powerful contribution from Paula Harriott, then of the Prison Reform Trust. And if we needed a further reminder of why we were doing this, the final item was not a speech but a performance by the Choir with No Name.

Development of services meant we had to develop our governance too, and that’s firmly the responsibility of the Chair and the Board. By early 2023, we were working on our bid for the UK Government’s Test and Learn Programme which we helped to devise: exciting, but an order of magnitude bigger than anything we had done before. Starting at a board awayday in Glasgow, we duly spent more time thinking through risks and mitigations.  The credit for the successful bid goes to the executive leadership team, but the board did its job too.

A few months after that, the Impact Forum in Cardiff again illustrated the range of the Centre’s work. The Keynote speech, Using evidence to achieve system change, came from Professor Dame Carol Black, who will shortly take over from me as Chair. But we again had plenty of involvement from front-line practitioners and people with lived experience.  We also launched our image bank of non-stigmatising photos of homeless people, and I was particularly pleased to catch up with the photographer, Jeff Hubbard, who I remember as a guest and then fellow volunteer at Hackney Winter Night Shelter.  

Finally, and looking forward, the 2019 strategy reached its end-point in 2024, and we spent a lot of time as a board and executive leadership team working through what the future strategy should contain.  It wasn’t easy – if it had been, we wouldn’t have been trying hard enough, in a world where homelessness continues to rise, and the challenges for front-line staff increase every day. We’ve identified three ambitious strands of work to play our part in tackling this situation. There’s a greater focus on prevention, on building collaboration between organisations and on encouraging greater experimentation and ever more learning.  

I still believe that homelessness is a fundamentally soluble problem. The UK Government has taken important steps to address the underlying problem of the shortage of housing in the Spending Review, as well as making money available directly to tackle homelessness. The work of the Centre will be vital in ensuring that this money is spent as well as possible.

I leave the Centre in excellent hands. I’d like to thank all the colleagues I’ve worked with, staff and board members, over the years: their positive attitude, hard work, and commitment to the cause have made this one of the most rewarding experiences of my working life. Together we really can end homelessness for good.

• Andrew Hudson is Chair of CHI and steps down from the role at the end of August.