Throughout 2024, Herefordshire Council engaged with the Centre for Homelessness Impact to explore how well government funded homelessness programmes were working and some of the system-wide issues driving increased levels of homelessness and rough sleeping across England. A great chance for us to reflect on how things were affecting us in Herefordshire. We were able to provide a unique rural perspective and we found the work engaging and rewarding in equal measure. It made us look in the mirror, at what we were doing and how we deliver our homelessness intervention, prevention and relief services.

What resonated with us, was that both urban and rural areas had a similar crisis around the increased cost of temporary accommodation (TA) - a combination of the high cost per unit and the scarcity of suitable accommodation available. As well as this, there was pressure on prevention and relief service accommodation costs (caused by too many people chasing too few properties), especially when linked to local housing allowance rates and the need to index link them at a national level. In many instances this presented both urban and rural landscapes with insurmountable obstacles to providing people at risk of or experiencing homelessness with access to accommodation or cost-effective TA.

As well as this, we noted that multi-agency working and how to facilitate and maximise the benefits of doing so has been a consistent theme across England. Partnership working takes time, effort and attention to make it work. If you want this type of work to flourish, you need to build a model that is systemic and structured, with clear pathways and intervention points. Support at every level of management and leadership is critical to ensure that the right staff are at the right table, with the right resources and right authority. If we want to provide support that helps people and interventions that prevent escalation to crisis level, we also need to be adopting a more trauma-informed way of working.

The big take away for Herefordshire was the need to shift our resource positioning from a reactive to a preventative approach. The challenge, as with other Local Authority areas, was how to do this within existing resources, so we could maintain our crisis response, whilst expanding and building up the prevention work. By this, we mean prevention seen through a lens that is much wider than homelessness. Housing generally tends to be among one of the last things to go wrong when people are affected by complex multiple disadvantage and trauma. So we wanted to understand how better  we could assist people earlier and across the whole of the local authority’s business. More work is needed on this and this is an area being further explored in Herefordshire.

What has been especially useful is the Cordis Bright system mapping. Seeing the interventions and intersections of services laid out this clearly is helping us evolve and grow our local system and responses. It challenges us to ‘do better’. Also, the Centre for Homelessness Impact’s wider work, in drawing together resources, research and ‘best practice’ to help authorities implement change has been very helpful.

Looking to the future, the work has highlighted the need for more informed and better cross-departmental cooperation, not just on homelessness and housing, but also early intervention across all areas of national (and local) government. We know what the key indicators are that threaten personal and familial stability. We need to build a support model that identifies these as early as possible. We need to build systems that provide advice and information to mitigate these risks, signposting people to where help can be found. We need systems that cooperate, have flexible budgets, and where people are supported to access the resources and help that enables them to live well.  

Waiting for things to get to crisis point before we offer help is not only bad for individuals, families and communities, it makes no sense financially in these times of tight public sector spending.  

Herefordshire is on the right track, and we are committed to working with colleagues and partners to continue to improve.

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Bob Barnett is Strategic Housing Officer at Herefordshire Council

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