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The writer is chief executive of Centre for Homelessness Impact, a charity
Prevention is better than cure, or so the saying goes. The US version is more specific: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That phrase is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, from a letter to a newspaper in 1735 advocating investment in preventing fires.
But making a case for it can be challenging. Deciding between spending on prevention and spending on demand-led activity means comparing something that has not happened to something that has. It is hard to prove Franklin’s trade-off. And yet the case for spending to prevent homelessness is one of the great challenges, and great opportunities, facing UK chancellor Rachel Reeves as she prepares for the spending review on Wednesday.
Homelessness spending in the UK has increased so fast that a growing number of councils say it puts their financial viability at risk. Local authority spending on services dealing with the issue in England rose from £1.3bn in 2010-11 to £3.1bn in 2023-24 in real terms.
Meanwhile, homelessness levels have soared. A record number — 126,040 households, including 80,530 families with 164,040 children — have lost their homes and are living in temporary accommodation. (This does not include those staying in hostels or sleeping rough.) This suggests current spending is not addressing the underlying causes. And it produces terrible outcomes — housing precarity, poor health, disrupted education and childhood development and stress on family relationships.Â
What is going wrong? The money currently being spent is almost all concentrated on acute responses after the fact — just £0.4bn out of the total spending in 2023-24 went on prevention. This pattern must be reversed.
In England, prevention currently has a narrow meaning. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 requires local authorities to assess and offer assistance to those threatened by homelessness within 56 days of them seeking help. This means short-term, reactive responses happen once a person, couple or family are on the brink of crisis.
All this piles extra costs on the most overstretched services: council budgets and local housing. There are other options. Earlier intervention could include rent subsidy, legal advice or representation on a tenancy issue, family mediation or time-limited support for someone leaving an institution such as the care system, hospital or prison.
The most effective approaches are social safety nets that protect the whole population — the NHS and welfare support are prime examples. Other universal prevention tools for homelessness should be deployed, such as a survey to screen secondary school pupils for risks of homelessness and refer them to support services if needed.
But there are barriers to making this work, as a recent report by the Institute for Government and Centre for Homelessness Impact shows. The supply of social housing and private rented housing affordable for people on low incomes is severely constrained. Perverse incentives prioritise short-term responses. Data quality is often poor. Services are fragmented. There is too little robust evaluation.
The chancellor should ensure that homelessness funding starts to prioritise upstream prevention, not crisis reaction. To drive this necessary turn, she should create an independent national endowment to fund, test and scale up innovations — we need an evidence base for prevention that works.
As secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Angela Rayner should in her coming homelessness strategy lay out a clear definition for ending it in all its forms, aligned with measures to track progress. She must insist on data sharing across public services that can provide early identification of individuals and cohorts at risk.
It is far better to prevent a fire from starting than to fight a blaze once it takes hold. Franklin would approve.
