Over the last couple of years, we have been working to bring organisations with different experiences to collaborate in some of the first randomised controlled trials in homelessness in the UK.

Today, we are taking the next big step by launching our Evaluation Panel - a group of 25 leading organisations with a wide range of interests and methodological expertise to help us build evidence of ‘what works’ in housing and homelessness. 

As a whole, the panel offers a wealth of expertise across multiple methods, including randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs, implementation and process evaluations, small-n impact evaluations, system-sensitive approaches, cost-benefit analysis, and more; and also across multiple subjects, including homelessness and housing, mental health, poverty and deprivation, criminal justice, employment, among others.  

In keeping with best practices, these organisations are independent from the projects they will evaluate - ensuring they can work closely together, while remaining objective and upholding the highest standards of transparency and quality. The panel will also streamline our commissioning process, ensuring that opportunities reach a pool of specialist organisations.

We anticipate reviewing membership of the panel every two years and inviting new organisations to apply, as well as reviewing the participation and performance of panel members at this stage.

We know that robust evaluations of homelessness interventions in the UK still remain incredibly rare as shown by the latest version of our Evidence and Gap Maps. By creating a panel of evaluators with whom we will work regularly, we will continue growing the community in the evaluation sector to ensure more robust evaluations of homelessness interventions and policies can be done in the future in the UK. Our hope is that the evaluation panel will be instrumental in helping the sector to better learn which interventions work best to end homelessness, why and for whom. We are very much looking forward to working with each of them in the years to come.

‍