Welsh law shows that early support prevents homelessness

A list of landlords’ phone numbers would have been the only support Alice Rivers could have expected from her local council if she had become homeless a few years ago. But following trailblazing legislation in 2015, Welsh councils have transformed the way they respond to people who have been evicted, as well as those at risk of losing their home, by intervening earlier and more creatively to prevent homelessness. So when Rivers, 18, was recently thrown out of the family home after coming out as transgender, Flintshire council found her a place in a temporary “nightstop” and is now helping her to move on to a place of her own in north-east Wales.

“I was so worried – I thought the council wouldn’t be able to help,” says Rivers. “I burst into tears when they told me they could find me somewhere.”

Under the Housing Wales Act, all Welsh local authorities are now required to work with anyone facing homelessness, whether through family breakdown, rent or mortgage arrears or eviction, and to help all those who actually become homeless, rather than those who reach certain thresholds of priority need. According to Flintshire, it is an approach that has seen staff able to move from “tick-box” decision-making to a much more supportive role.

“With a case [like Rivers] we will now say, ‘Here’s a young person who’s got a job and can’t go home – what can we do?’, whereas a few years ago we might have been saying, ‘There’s a narrow gap to help – will we let them through?’” says Katie Chubb, the customer services manager in charge of Flintshire’s Housing Solutions service. There’s been a real culture shift, she adds, so that, where once the focus was on sifting out those such as young single people who were not considered a priority, now staff are able to focus on offering some help and advice to all those who get in touch.

Flintshire, which borders the English county of Cheshire, was piloting the preventive approach before it came into force in April 2015. It has been praised by Shelter Cymru for the way it has been prepared to spend its share of the Welsh government’s £5.6m implementation fund on a range of measures to prevent homelessness. The council’s £228,000 spending in the first year has included helping with rental deposits and letting agents’ fees, paying off rent and mortgage arrears for those who might otherwise be evicted, and funding support workers and an environmental health officer to help sort out poor housing conditions in the private rented sector. It has also paid for a Shelter Cymru caseworker to work alongside its own officers, so transforming the once adversarial relationship between those making the decisions on homeless applicants and those challenging them. “Rather than sending letters to each other, we are working together,” says Shelter Cymru caseworker Ashleigh Stevens. “It’s a real change of focus – it used to be very prescriptive, but we now cooperate on how to resolve each situation, and there’s buy-in from everyone.”

Across Wales, initial results of the new approach are encouraging. While the number of households accepted as homeless in the last quarter of last year rose by 6% in England to 14,470, in Wales the number fell by some 67% to 405 in the same period. Lesley Griffiths, Welsh minister for communities and tackling poverty, says about two-thirds of those who have received help under the new legislation have successfully avoided homelessness. “The legislation is a UK first – it addresses the issues that cause homelessness and seeks to ensure that everyone who is homeless or at risk of homelessness gets the help they need to secure a stable home,” she says.

The success so far in Wales is fuelling calls for a similar homelessness prevention duty to be introduced in England. But isn’t it just easier to tackle homelessness in a smaller country like Wales where the pressures on housing simply aren’t so great? Not so, according to those on the Welsh frontline. Welfare reform and the bedroom tax have hit Wales particularly hard, adding to the problems of those who need to find a home they can afford. Simon Rose, housing needs manager at Newport council and chair of Wales’s homelessness network, says many areas in Wales including his own are struggling to meet the demand for social housing, while the private rented sector is becoming increasingly unaffordable. While the new prevention framework doesn’t solve those problems, it does give the council the flexibility to find new ways of helping people with their housing difficulties.

In Newport, that means the south Wales council, alongside offering rent deposits and clearing arrears, has even helped pay everyday bills in order to ensure one pregnant tenant could get settled in her home without the fear of running up debt. And, like Flintshire, Newport is also working closely with support services, and to ensure the most vulnerable people don’t get trapped in the revolving door of evictions, B&Bs or failed tenancies, which would end up costing the council more in the long run. “We estimate that for every pound we spend, we are saving £4,” says Rose. He adds that the new set-up gives housing officers much more autonomy to help people whatever their circumstances. “It changes the mindset of staff on the frontline,” he says. “They can now have an open and frank discussion with people about their options. It gives staff a bit more confidence in delivering – they become almost like salespeople in presenting the options.”

For someone like Anna Williams there is no doubt the new approach is working. Williams was helped by Rose and his team to avoid eviction after her marriage broke up and she was left with mortgage arrears. “Being a homeowner, I never thought I’d get the help I did. It was amazing,” she says. “I’m told councils in England don’t intervene till you’re on the doorstep and have got the bags in your hand, and that’s no good – you need help before that happens.”

But despite the success stories, how sustainable is the prevention approach given the squeeze on resources across the UK? Frances Beecher, chief executive of the Welsh homelessness charity Llamau, says there is a real drive in Wales to bring organisations together to tackle homelessness, but financial constraints and rising demand make it difficult. “It’s great that Wales is trailblazing, but there’s still an awful lot of work to do and the real difficulty will be carrying this through as austerity is pushed more,” she says. Nonetheless, she adds, Wales is taking an important lead. “It’s a phenomenally brave step to take in times of austerity, not to wait for a crisis point but to take a step back, get behind the issues and try to tackle them,” she says. “What’s so important is that we’ve now got a momentum, saying this is how we treat homeless people in Wales. I’m very proud of that as I believe you measure a society by how it respects and takes care of the most vulnerable.”

Some names have been changed

‘Helping people much sooner is crucial’

View image in fullscreen

When the housing charity Crisis sent out “mystery shoppers” back in 2014 to test how English councils dealt with single people facing homelessness, the results were disturbing. Of 87 cases, 50 received inadequate help, often being sent off with a leaflet about private landlords or turned away altogether. After those findings, Crisis set up an independent review of homelessness law in England and its verdict is clear: the law in England needs to be reformed to give homeless people, particularly single households, a better deal. The review, chaired by Suzanne Fitzpatrick, professor of housing and social policy at Heriot-Watt University, says a new law for England based on the Welsh experience would “provide robust support to a far greater number of people at a much earlier point”, while also giving cash-strapped councils more flexibility to deliver.

Hannah Gousy, senior policy officer at Crisis, says: “Helping people at a much earlier stage is crucial. In Wales it’s working very well and we know that local authorities are having to be much more flexible in coming up with new and innovative ways of preventing homelessness .”

Many English authorities already do good work on prevention, Gousy adds, but making it a legal duty would mean it was it a must, not an add-on. “There is lots of good prevention and relief work out there, but some local authorities can get away with doing very little,” she says.

Some councils at the sharpest end of the housing shortage have already come out for reform – among them Newham in east London which has said it is studying the Welsh model. Gousy says Crisis research shows every person who is not helped to avoid homelessness costs the public purse between £3,000 and £18,000 in the first year alone, so prevention in the areas of highest demand makes sense.

“London local authorities are at breaking point when it comes to homelessness,” she says “You could argue that it’s even even more important for them than for Wales to focus on tackling homelessness at an early stage.”