Last week Stephen joined charities, businesses, housing providers and local leaders at 10 Downing Street for the first Rough Sleeping Summit to be held there.
The Prime Minister used the summit to restate his goal that everyone sleeping rough in England will be offered a route off the streets before Christmas, backed by £432 million to keep that support going after this winter.
We welcome both. Getting someone indoors before the coldest months is urgent work, and our teams will be part of it.
The harder question is where that person will be next summer.
A room is where the work starts
Rough sleeping is rarely the whole story. Most people we support reached the street after a chain of events: a relationship breaking down, leaving prison or hospital with nowhere to go, domestic abuse, drug or alcohol use. Emergency accommodation ends the night on the street. On its own, it doesn’t resolve any of the things that led there.
How we’d measure success
A headcount on Christmas Eve will tell us how many people came inside. It won’t tell us whether the pledge worked. For that, we’d look at how many people are still in a home six months and a year later, and whether fewer people are arriving on the streets in the first place.
Getting there depends on things that take longer than a winter. There need to be enough move-on homes across private rented, social and supported housing. Health, mental health and drug and alcohol services need to follow people into their tenancy instead of stopping at the hostel door. Prevention work has to reach people before they hit crisis. And people who have slept rough should help design the response, because they know exactly where the current system lets people fall through.
No single organisation can deliver that, Government included. The summit felt like a genuine attempt to get everyone pulling in the same direction, and Stephen left encouraged.
Names, not numbers
Every person counted this winter has a name, a history and their own reason for ending up on the street. We’ll keep working with partners, local authorities and the people we support so that, for as many of them as possible, this Christmas is the start of something that lasts.