Comment: Longhurst Group

COMMENT

How we upped our game on homelessness

Fay Hirel, Head of Care and Support for Cambridgeshire, Longhurst Group

It’s now nearly a year since Boris Johnson told us all to Stay Home, Protect the NHS and Save Lives; but what about those who didn’t have a place to call home?

Covid-19 has shone a bright light on the inequalities that still exist in society and none more so than for those who are sleeping on our streets.

The Everyone In scheme, which saw thousands of homeless people offered self-contained accommodation during the pandemic, was a huge national effort that moved the issue up the agenda.

Now, as we hopefully begin to emerge from Covid, it’s vitally important that the lessons we’ve learned from the last 12 months shape our delivery in the future. It’s been a jolt for everyone and it’s demanded that we think differently about the way we approach a range of issues in the housing sector, and homelessness is no different.

It’s made us work with partners we may have worked with in the past, but never to the levels we’re doing now.

During the pandemic, we worked with hotels in Peterborough where there were more than 100 households staying temporarily.

We spent a lot of time looking at the residents we had in our hostel accommodation, our move-on accommodation, and seeing where we could move on those people who were ready, to free up beds for people staying temporarily in the hotels.

That required a huge amount of joined-up working between us other housing associations, charitable groups and Peterborough City Council, with all of us pulling together to help people move on to ease the pressure on the hotels.

This chain reaction has informed the way we’re going to work in the future in that area of the country, post-Covid.

Now there’s going to be a clear supported housing pathway so the right people can be prioritised for beds in supporting housing, when they need it, with those people who’ve already been through that journey being able to move on, whether that’s with ourselves, another housing group or through private rent.

We’ve always worked well in partnership with other organisations, but the last 12 months have thrown us closer together than ever before.

I don’t think we’d have done that in the way that we have, or have been as far down the line as we are, were it not for Covid – it’s definitely fast tracked changes to the way we work.

I’ve worked in homelessness services for over 20 years and I’ve never seen this kind of joined-up response to get people off the streets – it’s been incredible.

It’s now on us to make sure that changes that we’ve made during the pandemic stick. I think, as a sector and as a country, there needs to be more done around prevention to stop a person becoming homeless in the first place.

Personally, I can’t ever see us returning to how it was pre-pandemic – and I don’t think we ever should allow ourselves to. As a sector, we’ve come too far and the pace of change has been so great, because it had to be, that we won’t go back.

As organisations, we’ve all got different policies and ways of working, but our end goal is always the same and that’s to help people off the streets.

We might do it slightly differently but we’re all in it for the same reason – to keep people safe, give them a place they can call home and do everything we can to improve their lives.

“We might do it slightly differently but we’re all in it for the same reason – to keep people safe, give them a place they can call home and do everything we can to improve their lives”