Homelessness services face cliff-edge unless Labour gives budget boost for rough sleepers

Big Issue has joined other leading homelessness organisations in urging Labour to prevent a funding cliff-edge that could see support for people on the streets slashed next year.

In an open letter to the government, 23 homelessness organisations, led by St Mungo’s and including Shelter and Centrepoint, have pleaded with the government to protect Rough Sleeping Initiative (RSI) funding, which is due to end in March next year.

Around £500m in RSI funding has been allocated to local authorities, charities and frontline organisations over the last three years. But no decision has been made on its future with charities calling for the government to set out funding at this month’s budget as the homelessness crisis deepens.

RSI covers around a third of the cost of St Mungo’s commissioned services, totalling around £17.6m. That enables the charity to provide services like Housing First in Westminster to get people off the streets and prevent them from returning.

Emma Haddad, CEO at St Mungo’s, said: “Without vital sources of funding like the Rough Sleeping Initiative, yet more people will experience the trauma of homelessness, and our collective aim of ending homelessness for good will be pushed even further away.  

“As we approach the budget, leading voices in the homelessness and housing sectors are asking the government to protect RSI funding so that homelessness services can continue, and no one faces a life of uncertainty without a home.” 

The Big Issue is in Newcastle this week as part of our Big Community Roadshow. All parts of the Big Issue Group are heading out to will listen, report and support in places that have been let down in the past but have the ideas, spirit and people to plot better futures.

As part of the Roadshow, the Big Issue spoke to North East homelessness charity Changing Lives at its Newcastle housing project Alex’s Place.

Jacqui Cox, operational lead for Changing Lives, manages outreach teams across North Tyneside, Northumberland and Newcastle.

“The outreach service in Northumberland and North Tyneside will not exist,” she told the Big Issue when asked what the loss of RSI funding would mean for the charity.

“I live in Whitley Bay, which is in the North Tyneside area. I can walk my dogs at six o’clock in the morning down to the beach and I see people rough sleeping. I chat to a guy who’s using our service and he’s rough sleeping – there’ll be no service for him.”

Like in other parts of the country, rough sleeping increased in the North East in the most recent official government count, rising 46% in autumn 2023 with 89 people spotted compared to 61 people in autumn 2022.

RSI funding makes up a large share of Changing Lives’ funding and the charity is calling for longer-term funding.

That has been echoed in St Mungos’ open letter with charities calling for RSI funding to be extended and protected for at least three years to give enough time to strengthen homelessness prevention.

“The RSI funding is always short-term. It is short-sighted to give local authorities small pockets of money so they end up doing small pockets of work. It’s never long-term funding,” said Cox.

“If you get 12 months of funding and you start talking to somebody who’s experienced rough sleeping you might have just built a bit of trust in that time. You want something that’s a bit more long-term thinking. We’re not proactive, it’s always reactive.”

The rising cost of homelessness and temporary accommodation has been pushing council budgets to the brink across the UK.

A total of 3,140 individuals were assessed presenting as homeless between January and March in the North East. Around 800 households were living in temporary accommodation, including 460 children.

Newcastle City Council has been feeling the cost. The local authority scrapped proposed cuts to homelessness prevention contracts from £3.3m to £1.6m in February.

Instead, a new homelessness plan is set to be agreed at a council cabinet meeting later in October.

The city council has been a blueprint for homelessness prevention efforts since it developed a strategy for the first time in 2003.

Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, 24,000 households were prevented from becoming homeless – the highest proportionate rate of homelessness prevention across England’s cities, the council said.

Those efforts saw more than 100 local organisations come together to identify people at risk of homelessness and work to prevent it.

The work earned the council a prestigious prize at the World Habitat Awards in 2020.

But now the local authority is facing a fresh challenge to keep people in their homes.

Councillor Paula Maines, Newcastle City Council cabinet member for a Living City, said: “Newcastle has a strong record of preventing homelessness however, the combination of poverty, the rising cost of living, housing scarcity, increasing housing demand and limited supply presents a significant challenge for our housing system.

“Our anti-poverty strategy also sets out our commitment to make the prevention of homelessness everybody’s responsibility through the identification of the triggers to homelessness including household’s struggling with income and debt. We aim to make sure that nobody is evicted into homelessness because they cannot afford to pay their rent.

“Where people are homeless, we commission a range of options for accommodation with additional support to try and ensure that any experience of homelessness is rare, brief and nonrecurring.

“We want all of our residents to have a chance to live in a place that meets their needs and offer a range of outreach support services to assist with this.

“Bringing all our housing services together in our new housing and communities directorate will help us provide more joined up services for all of our residents.”

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