8 July 2021
Tackling homelessness in Newcastle -Upon -Tyne
Councillor Joyce McCarty
Deputy Leader
Newcastle City Council
Newcastle City Council, in partnership with its ALMO Your Homes Newcastle (YHN) and more than 100 agencies and organisations across the city, has prevented over 24,000 households from becoming homeless since 2014. It has the highest homelessness prevention rate of England’s core cities. Last December, this achievement was recognised with the prestigious international World Habitat 2020 Gold Award for our long term approach to homelessness prevention.
Poverty and deprivation were already long-standing issues in the city before the government’s decade-long austerity programme reduced local authority budgets by a third and cut welfare spending. The council will lose another £30m in austerity programme cuts scheduled for 2021-22, yet and it has pledged to become the first UK city to eradicate homelessness.
Last year alone, 918 individuals were given supported accommodation and 4,233 cases of homelessness last year were prevented. Evictions from Your Homes Newcastle properties have been cut by 75% since 2008. Here Council Deputy Leader Joyce McCarty explains how it’s been done.
HOMELESSNESS is always a crisis, whether someone has been homeless for a day or a year. Its impact ripples out far beyond the distress and damage done to the individuals and families who find themselves with no place to call their own.
Their communities also pay the price in a host of often hidden ways. Councils, services and charities have to try to put right the physical, mental and financial costs of homelessness, and in the last austerity-driven ten years, they’ve had to do that with fewer and fewer resources. All of us feel discomfort and helplessness when we see rough sleepers on our own streets.
People who have fallen into homelessness are never happy about the turn their life has taken; it’s something almost no-one deliberately chooses. The rest of us often are – and should be – ashamed that one of the world’s richest economies can’t find a way to put a roof over every citizen’s head.
Obviously, there are no quick fixes. But here in Newcastle we have found the slow, steady, consistent fix that eradicates homelessness for good.
How? Obviously, the root causes of homelessness are complex and there’s no one road that leads there. But the council decided in 2013 to make preventing homelessness a priority. Now we’ve committed ourselves to eradicating homelessness entirely. Despite the complexity of the problem, we have come to understand that we only need to follow a single guiding principle to make this apparently unattainable ambition achievable. In this city, we no longer see homelessness as only crisis management.
With our many partners across the city, from government agencies to charities and welfare organisations, we now see homelessness as a process. It’s somewhere people arrive after a sequence of events that – often quite slowly – push an individual or a family over the edge. There is nothing inevitable about the final destination; so it follows that if we can get help to them before the crisis point, everyone wins.
Austerity has been at least partly responsible, although we were already on this road. Bed and breakfast accommodation to fulfill our statutory duty to look after the homeless was a crippling cost for the council in the early 2000s, but we haven’t needed to use B&B to meet our homelessness duties since 2006.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
But a partnership approach was simply the right thing to do. It is about fairness, inclusion and social justice. We should be putting our resources into identifying those at risk of homelessness as early as possible and working with them to keep a roof over their head. Our focus should be wider than a literal interpretation of the law – our commitment is to end every kind of homelessness, whether that’s rough sleeping, sofa surfing, or being forced to live in hostels and B&Bs.
And it turns out that what is right also happens to be what is best value for money. When we can support someone in the home they already have, that will always be cheaper than a crisis-driven emergency response.The city commissions 779 rooms to respond to homelessness. Ideally these should be a quick, short-term fix to get someone off the street, but we know that hostels don’t solve homelessness and that people can get ‘stuck’ in hostels. This approach doesn’t help anyone solve the conundrum of needing an income to get a home, yet needing a home to be able to get and keep a job
The main ingredients of Newcastle’s approach are:
• Partnership: the key principle of the Active Inclusion Newcastle partnership approach that we launched in 2013 is that we work more effectively together. Some examples include our major partnership with Crisis, the national homelessness charity; with financial inclusion groups, who can identify those who haven’t enough income to pay rent and bills and offer help early; with local DWP offices on difficulties around Universal Credit.
• Evidence-based decisions: Early on, for instance, we looked at other projects to end homelessness in Scotland, Canada, Scandinavia and many other parts of the world. We have become a learning organisation.
• Checking whether what we do is working: We welcome research into what we’re doing – we have a thriving partnership with Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University – and research findings influence what we do. In 2019 Heriot-Watt conducted a major study, Homelessness Prevention in Newcastle: Examining the role of the ‘local state’ in the context of austerity and welfare reforms.
• Knowing our community: We can now say that we know who is homeless in our city, and why they are homeless. We know their background and we learn from every story they tell us. That’s how we know for certain that very, very few people choose to be homeless.
It’s never been more important to understand homelessness and how we can end it. We know that in the next few years, people are going to be poorer. We know we have to be really creative with dwindling resources. We also know that our communities are not as resilient as they were back in 2007 when the global financial crisis first hit. Austerity cuts have hollowed out expertise and knowledge as social support organisations have been closed and staff have been laid off to save money.The bottom line is that crisis management is always more expensive than prevention, and it’s a mindset that can even alienate people who would otherwise ask for help before things get too bad. It’s often short-term relief that doesn’t tackle root causes. It doesn’t build for the future. So this is an opportunity to do things differently, and to look around us and cherry pick the best of what others are doing. We can’t afford not to
