Talking Local Government Homelessness with World Habitat

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World Habitat is a UK charity working across the world to “recognise and highlight innovative, outstanding and sometimes revolutionary housing ideas, projects and programmes from across the world”.  They initiated and work with 13 cities as part of the European End Street Homelessness Campaign. The World Habitat Awards “recognise innovative, outstanding and sometimes revolutionary ideas projects and programs” in housing and homelessness response around the world.

The team at World Habitat helped me tremendously in identifying and connecting with homelessness teams working on innovative programs in many different places. It was wonderful to meet up with CEO, David Ireland and Homelessness project manager, Ella Hancock (virtually) in Leicester on World Homelessness Day, 10 October 2022.

Their knowledge across countries and sectors is broad – here are some of the points that piqued my interest when we talked about local government and homelessness.  

Defining and measuring homelessness

  • Having an agreed definition of homelessness and expected outcomes is helpful. It also helps you measure. The Centre for Homelessness Impact has done significant work to define and measure homelessness, focusing on prevention and if homelessness occurs ensuring it is rare, brief and non-recurring.  If all these factors are tracking down, you can see progress.
  • If you can get multiple councils working to the same indicators and seeing measurable outcomes you can make comparisons.
  • Data and info will inform responses. This is vital to fully understand the problem and make cases for interventions. When you have info you shift from thinking about whether you should do something to actually doing it.

 Homelessness requires a joint response.

  • Rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg. It’s not enough to focus on rough sleeping, cities need to look at solving all the problems that surround and lead to homelessness. These might be housing or health related, or the requirements of people coming out of hospitals or the criminal justice system.
  • Different parts of government (not just those with the homelessness portfolio) can have an impact on different elements of homelessness. If everyone is working to the same plan it makes it much easier.

What can local government do?

  • Be a strategic lead. Local Government have many different powers and responsibilities and someone needs to take the lead.
  • Councils have better levers than many others to bring in funding and mobilise people. Local government can lead by setting strategy - one thing that everyone is working towards. Councils without a strategy struggle.
  • Don't just prioritise homelessness when in a crisis. A lot of councils don't see homelessness as a problem because they have relatively few rough sleepers, but that does not mean other types of homelessness don't exist. 
  • Prevention stops you getting to crisis point.

Mobilising and encouraging action

  • Mayors definitely have a role to play in mobilising action - you can see this in places like Manchester where you have a mayor who has been elected with a strong manifesto on homelessness.
  • Personalise homelessness - tell stories. They are good at this in the US (see Community Solutions).  Bring out the story of a person. The moment you humanise it. When a person sees a human face, you change something.

Video about World Habitat: https://world-habitat.org/about-world-habitat/who-we-are/

Defining a shared vision of an end to homelessness:  https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/defining-a-shared-vision-of-an-end-to-homelessness/

Below - with David Ireland, CEO of World Habitat

The screenshot below outlines World Habitat's focus and is from their 2021-22 Annual Report (p.51)





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