Covid effectively ended rough sleeping with the Everyone In scheme. So where did it all go wrong?

Five years ago, as the Covid-19 pandemic put the UK into lockdown, rough sleeping ended. Or at least that’s the myth.

The Everyone In scheme in England – and similar efforts in Scotland and Wales – saw thousands of rough sleepers housed in hotels, leaving the streets deserted and offering a golden opportunity to make street homelessness a thing of the past.

It didn’t endure, of course. England’s official rough sleeping snapshot showed last month that more than 4,600 people were counted on the streets in autumn 2024. Up 20% in a year and shade under the peak high recorded in 2017.

How has the state of homelessness across the country been allowed to fall so far?

Big Issue spoke to some of the people who worked tirelessly on Everyone In’s frontline to find out whether the scheme was the greatest missed opportunity in generations to end street homelessness for good or a shining example of what is possible.

‘As a piece of leadership, it was brilliant’

It initially wasn’t clear what would happen to people on the street as news of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan and the spread of the illness reached the UK.

But by the time then-prime minister Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown on March 23 2020, wheels were in motion to take people off the streets and into hotels left vacant.

The government’s homelessness tsar Baroness Louise Casey, who had already had a reputation for reducing rough sleeping after playing a role in New Labour’s successes, and then-housing secretary Robert Jenrick led the charge.

It was Casey’s letter to local authorities and rallying cry to frontline charities that sparked action on an unprecedented scale and granted homelessness both the political will and national attention it so often fails to garner.

“Before they decided to do anything, we were issuing press releases and sending things out saying, “My God, has everyone forgotten the homeless population?” Matt Downie, chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis, told the Big Issue.

“She sent me the letter that they were going to send out to all the local authorities. And I said, ‘How would you feel, Louise, if we leak this to the press?’ She said: go for it. So we did and, for about four or five hours, the issue of homelessness led every news outlet in this country.

“I’ve been at this for many, many years and it’s the only time I’d ever seen, genuinely, that homelessness was top of the entire news agenda and it was utterly extraordinary to see.

“There was bugger all money – I think it was £1.6m – there’s no money and yet everyone jumped to it. Just the scale of achievement based on audacity I suppose is something that is really always worth remembering.”

Over the course of the Everyone In scheme in England, more than 37,000 people were helped.

A study from the University College London estimated that the preventative measures during the first Covid lockdown alone saved 266 lives, 338 intensive care admissions, 1,164 hospital admissions and 21,000 infections among the homeless population.

The scheme was a massive success and a colossal undertaking with thousands of frontline workers working around the clock to make it happen.

“As a piece of leadership, a piece of communications, it was just so brilliant. Even the name – a memorable name for a project which everybody really understood what the process was. It was simple, well-communicated and literally directed from the centre,” said Jacob Dimitriou, the director for England at Housing Justice.

The charity plays a leading role in running night shelters across the country and Dimitriou said the process of decanting people from shelters in London, putting them in black cabs onto hotels was far from straightforward. Not least because many members of Dimitriou’s team were already testing positive for the disease.

But the enormity of what was happening was not lost on them.

“I think it took us the best part of two weeks to fully close everything. I mean that, in itself, is a remarkable thing. I think, probably for the first time in modern history, no faith community group was running a night shelter out of a church hall or community centre,” said Dimitriou.

“I remember the coordinator at that night shelter when I arrived they were like: “This isn’t going to happen. I do not believe we’re going to send all of these people into single-room accommodation”. At the end they said to me: “This is incredible. We’re nationalising homelessness provision”. I suppose if you had to say what happened, that is basically what we did.”

Dimitriou told the Big Issue of long hours and late finishes. That was true for Daniel Dumoulin, director of development and external affairs at Depaul UK, too.

He began 13-hour night shifts managing a Travelodge in Waterloo that housed 150 rough sleepers. From there, Depaul UK moved on to managing facilities at the Excel Centre and Tower Hamlets as well as taking over a youth hostel in central Manchester.

They also ran care facilities for people who were Covid positive in London and Manchester and Dumoulin notes that there was no record of any Covid cases spreading in the service that accommodated more than 600 people. It’s an achievement he’s proud of.

“It was an incredible thing to see. We had this intractable problem of people sleeping rough and all of a sudden all of these hotels are empty. They were filling up and people who’d been sleeping rough for, in many cases, years were coming inside. It was a very busy time,” said Dumoulin.

“I think something we can learn is that homelessness charities can mobilise really quickly. We can bring on accommodation very, very quickly indeed, if the funding is there and if we’ve got support from partners in government.”

‘We’ve moved past Dickensian church hall floors’

Everyone In was such a success because it removed all the barriers that exist to prevent people from moving off the streets.

People who are street homeless are often blocked from support because they do not have a local connection to the area, are not considered priority need or do not have recourse to public funds because of their immigration status.

The Everyone In scheme threw this out of the window. Instead, simply living on the street was enough to be helped off it.

Those barriers have been reintroduced since the pandemic measures were relaxed but Downie insisted that the Welsh government has opted to continue many of the policies.

“It meant that this two-tier legal system that we’d had before became a one-tier legal system. So there was no such thing as non-priority homelessness when it came to giving people accommodation. And effectively the priority need test was abandoned,” he said.

Everyone In also offered a rare opportunity to modernise how homeless people are treated.

Around 130 night shelters were operating in England in 2020 with most sticking to the time-honoured tradition of providing beds in a communal setting, often resulting in beds on church floors.

That was exactly the kind of setting where the disease threatened to flourish.

Dimitriou recalled: “There are lots of positives about a communal setting, aren’t there? People feed off each other’s sense of community and that communal setting can be a good thing. But, actually, in a quite scary, odd moment during those early days of the pandemic, it was pretty bloody horrible actually with lots of people really scared, lots of people kicking off.”

Now, he said, there were around 89 night shelters operating in England with an estimated 1,200 beds split roughly into half single room and half communal areas. 

The government committed to a £10m Night Shelter Transformation Fund off the back of the learnings from the pandemic and it has lived up to the name.

“My bit of the sector has probably been transformed,” said Dimitriou. “If you look at what happened to night shelters after 23 March 2020, they are infinitely better than they were five years ago. That is because of that experience of moving into single room but also because lots of people used it as an opportunity to improve their service.”

It’s a point that Downie agrees with.

“It stepchanges some, really, hundreds of years old responses to homelessness, which are about shoving people on church hall floors or dormitories, those sorts of things, because you couldn’t do that for safety anymore,” the Crisis boss said.

“We’ve moved past having Dickensian congregate church hall floors. Let’s do things better.”

Homelessness has been ‘supercharged’

Ultimately, many of the people housed in Everyone In moved on to long-term accommodation and the scheme was undoubtedly even a success for helping some rough sleepers who had been on the streets for years into accommodation.

But the scheme did uncover the reality of just how many people were facing street homelessness in 2020.

“I had a regular bilateral with the minister and the minister was basically saying: “Where do you think these people have come from?” I think they planned for about 10,000 people and had 39,000 in,” said Dimitrious.

“I remember saying to the minister: “Our problem is now your problem.” The problem of non-commissioned night shelters – we had a lot of people who weren’t UK nationals who were lost or forgotten about within the immigration system. What you’d conveniently passed over to our bit of the sector, you have nationalised and that is now everybody’s problem.”

While Everyone In did bring an estimated 90% of rough sleepers off the streets, it did not deal with many of the factors that led to people being there in the first place.

In fact, many of these factors would be “supercharged” as the pandemic continued.

A commission led by the former head of the civil service – the late Lord Bob Kerslake – warned back in 2022 of a “new homelessness crisis as well as an economic crisis”. 

The independent group of 36 experts from the health, housing and homelessness sectors recommended a temporary evictions ban and raising local housing allowance rates to ensure that the gains made during Everyone In remained.

Evictions were blocked and LHA were raised in 2020 but the cost of living crisis that followed saw rents skyrocket to record highs while LHA rates were frozen until last year. That left low-income renters struggling to keep their home or find a new one.

There has been no meaningful uptick in social housing over recent years either. 

Meanwhile, barriers returned as Everyone In went away with people living under the no recourse to public funds condition facing destitution on the streets.

Measures to cut the asylum backlog in 2023 have also had an impact on rough sleeping with a surge in people evicted from Home Office accommodation.

Ultimately, despite the Tories’ 2019 manifesto pledge to end rough sleeping, political will frittered away.

“We’ve seen when you give everyone legal rights, that homelessness can go down but then there was no energy to hook on to. Louise Casey had gone. Robert Jenrick wasn’t really interested in that at all,” said Downie.

“There was so much political capital to be had by what had just happened. Quite rightly I think Robert Jenrick, along with Louise Casey and all the people that were doing the stuff, should take credit for Everyone In.

“But I think it became so easy to say, ‘Yeah we did do something big on homelessness. That’s it for now.’

“All the same problems that led to the scale of homelessness that was being dealt with: the freezing of local housing allowance, the lack of social housing, the immigration system, producing mass homelessness. All of that wasn’t just still there, it was being supercharged.”

‘I thought we sorted out all the rough sleeping’

In many ways – and as preposterous as it sounds – the Everyone In scheme was almost too successful.

The simplicity of the idea struck a chord with the public and the idea that rough sleeping had been ended – if briefly – took hold.

“I remember seeing my auntie at Christmas time in 2020 and she asked what I was doing at work,” said Dimitrious.

“I was confused and said: ‘I’m still doing the same thing.’ And she went: “I thought we sorted out all of the rough sleeping now because everybody’s gone into hotels.”

“I think it was so well communicated and the public really got it. The public really got the thing about: ‘Oh yeah, the hotels are empty so we’re going to put everyone in hotels.’ It really resonated with people so I think a lot of people thought: What else is there to do?”

That had consequences for homelessness charities too.

Homelessness has hit fresh heights five years on from Everyone In. The number of households in temporary accommodation is at a record high while the official rough sleeping snapshot showed surging numbers if slightly down from the 2017 peak.

But with the success of Everyone In fresh in the memory, it took time to convince the public that street homelessness in particular still needed attention.

“It’s a bittersweet time for us all, because what also happened is that, probably for about two or three years afterwards, it was really hard,” said Downie.

“Despite the fact that homelessness is breaking records it was really hard to get the general public to understand that because the response was, ‘Oh wasn’t that dealt with during the pandemic.’

“The campaigning, the fundraising, the awareness raising, gets harder.”

‘It was a strange time to be alive’

Despite the chaos and uncertainty of the pandemic and the early days of Everyone In, many of the frontline workers who made it happen look back on the time with fondness.

Some projects have endured. Dumoulin pointed to the London Youth Hub – a 26-bed service in London for 18-24 year olds run by New Horizon Youth Centre and Depaul UK and funded by the Greater London Authority – as a “really important legacy of Everyone In”. 

“It was a strange time to be alive generally,” he said. “You had all that going on but it was incredibly satisfying. It was hard work and it was stressful, setting up new projects, closing them down, moving them but if you work in homelessness and you’re part of an effort that gets thousands of people off the street, you’re going to look back on it, in some ways, as a pretty positive time.”

If nothing else, the call-to-arms that the scheme represented showed that the homelessness sector and people who care about ending rough sleeping will take action when the matter is treated as the health emergency it is.

Dimitriou said: “The most enduring lesson is: if you are clear, particularly with community groups, about what you want from them, they’ll probably do it. They’ll probably do it quite well. And if you resource them properly, they’ll do it extremely well.”

How Labour can tap into the spirit of Everyone In

The golden opportunity that the Everyone In scheme represented to end rough sleeping for good has passed.

The Labour government has made big promises on tackling homelessness, pledging to spend £1bn in the next year on the issue with an increase in funding for prevention.

Ministers are set to unveil a long-term homelessness strategy this summer for England – both Wales and Scotland have existing strategies.

It’s not likely to make too much difference in the short-term. Crisis boss Downie told the Big Issue the current fiscal situation means there is unlikely to be an “enormous breakthrough” on homelessness in the near future.

The new strategy – alongside a long-term housing plan that is also on the cards – must look to put social housing at its heart to prevent people being locked out of an unaffordable housing market.

It will take long-term systemic solutions and years of commitment to ultimately end rough sleeping rather than short-term action, no matter how transformative.

That, perhaps, is the ultimate legacy of the Everyone In scheme.

“I’m much more urging them to get the foundations of a plan to properly design homelessness out into their policymaking because the problem with the way homelessness is dealt with in policy terms, is initiative-itis,” said Downie.

“We want to throw the latest pot of funding or a successful scheme for one bit of homelessness or a bit of time, and in many ways, Everyone In is the shiniest example of an initiative. It was not a systemic solution.”

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