The Vision Project

HOW WE
CAN END
HOMELESSNESS
WRITTEN BY JON SPARKES
Jon is the Chief Executive of Crisis, a national charity that works directly with thousands of
homeless people every year.
Right now in Great Britain there
are 170,000 individuals or families
experiencing the worst forms of
homelessness – rough sleeping,
sleeping in places not meant for human
habitation, staying in homeless hostels
or emergency Bed and Breakfast (B&B)
accommodation or sofa-surfing with
people they may not even know...
At Crisis we don’t think that this is necessary,
neither do we believe it to be inevitable. We believe
that homelessness can be ended but to do this
we need to stop making plans which aspire only
to show how homelessness can be managed or at
best contained.
There are many reasons for people becoming
homeless. Some people become homeless when
they leave prison or the care system; others when
their relationship breaks down, when their landlord
wishes to put up the rent or when they deal with
difficulties by turning to drink, or because they
have been the victim of domestic abuse.
Experiencing one or more of these things can be
extremely stressful, and the pressure of dealing
with this can quickly build up, often culminating in
long term homelessness.
Not all of us however would follow this path
to losing our homes, and if we did experience
homelessness it might be brief rather than long
term. The claim that we are all two or three pay
cheques away from homelessness simply isn’t true.
Many of us facing one of the challenges above
would still have access to a home, or the support
necessary to get back into new homes of our own
as soon as possible.
What leads to these situations making someone
homeless, and keeping them homeless, is the lack
of a safe, affordable home of their own to move
into and the support needed to make it work.
However, we do not have enough homes
available to stop people becoming homeless. We
haven’t built enough social homes, so people are
more reliant on private renting.
This often results in homelessness strategies
which set out how much temporary
accommodation is needed year-on-year,
stretching into the future with long-term
commissioning plans focusing on procuring
B&B placements and accommodation available
on a night-by-night basis. These strategies,
however, rarely set out how we can go beyond
that, to a point where rather than just managing
homelessness, at great financial and individual
cost, we set about ending it.
DEVELOPING HEALTH & INDEPENDENCE
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