When strategy meets delivery: England’s homelessness paradox

It is possible for a system to spend more, work harder, and still produce worse outcomes. That is the paradox revealed by England’s latest homelessness statistics.

The newest official figures show pressure intensifying across every part of the system at once. More than 134,760 households are now living in temporary accommodation, the highest number recorded - including 175,990 children. Meanwhile the annual rough sleeping snapshot estimates 4,793 people sleeping rough on a single night, also a record. At the same time, public spending on homelessness has risen sharply, with government estimating total expenditure at £3.7 billion in 2024-25, including £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation alone. These trends matter; not simply because the numbers are high, but because they are moving in the wrong direction at precisely the moment England has adopted its most ambitious homelessness strategy to date. 

At first glance, this appears contradictory. In reality, it reveals something more complex: a system caught between strategy and delivery. Over recent years England has reached an unusual level of strategic clarity. Prevention has moved to the centre of policy thinking. The new national strategy draws on extensive evidence and systems analysis, including one of the first serious attempts anywhere to understand homelessness as a whole system rather than a collection of programmes. In strategic terms, the diagnosis is no longer the central problem.

What has become clearer, however, is that strategy alone does not change outcomes. Ambition  has expanded faster than the institutions responsible for delivery have been able to adapt. Reforms such as the Homelessness Reduction Act 2018 deliberately widened statutory duties so that more people could receive help earlier. That shift strengthened the safety net and reflected an important policy choice: homelessness prevention should be a shared public responsibility rather than a last-resort intervention. But expanding responsibility did not automatically create the coordination required to make prevention routine. Homelessness rarely originates within a single service. It emerges at the boundaries between housing, welfare, health, justice and migration systems. Responsibility for responding remains largely local, while many of the drivers sit elsewhere across government. The result is a system working harder within structures that were not designed for integrated prevention.

Fragmentation is particularly visible in large urban areas. London, for example, contains thirty-two local authorities with statutory homelessness duties operating within a single housing and labour market. Similar dynamics exist across other city regions. When obligations expand within fragmented governance arrangements, pressure accumulates in temporary accommodation as local systems manage risks they cannot resolve alone. The paradox therefore reflects a mismatch between strategic ambition and delivery capability rather than a failure of intent. Homelessness pressures operate across functional housing markets that rarely align with local authority boundaries, yet funding, commissioning and accountability remain organised at borough level, making coordinated prevention significantly harder at the scale at which homelessness actually occurs.

Addressing fragmentation

Evidence from public service reform suggests that once policy consensus has been achieved, progress depends less on new strategies and more on how implementation is organised. Successful transformations typically rely on continuous accountability, clear outcome goals, shared data and institutions capable of resolving barriers across organisational boundaries. Advisory groups and annual or two-year reviews provide important leadership and insight, but they rarely generate sustained change without an operational delivery backbone.

Encouragingly, elements of that backbone are beginning to emerge locally. In London, Greater Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region, regional accelerator programmes are attempting to address fragmentation directly by working at the scale of functional economic areas rather than individual authorities. Regional delivery units are being developed to align governance, data and investment decisions around shared prevention outcomes. The work is complex and still evolving, but it demonstrates that integration is possible when systems are organised deliberately around delivery.

What is striking is that this kind of integration is advancing more quickly at regional level than nationally. At national level, coordination remains largely organised within departmental boundaries. There is no equivalent shared outcomes framework aligning government departments around prevention, nor a dedicated delivery function responsible for tracking progress and resolving cross-government barriers in real time as is now in place to track local government outcomes. Without that connection, promising local innovation risks remaining isolated rather than becoming systemic change. 

To be clear, strengthening delivery capability is not about centralising power or reversing devolution. Local flexibility works best when supported by clear national accountability and shared infrastructure for learning. Experience from other reforms, from education improvement to the COVID-19 vaccine development and rollout, shows that ambitious goals become achievable when strategy is paired with focused delivery capability able to align effort across institutions.

Catalysing a genuine prevention turn therefore requires investment not only in services but in implementation itself. Clear and meaningful outcome targets are essential for aligning effort across systems – England’s new strategy sets strong direction but offers few measurable outcome commitments of organising delivery across government. Continuous feedback loops and rigorous evaluation enable policy to adapt as evidence emerges. Dedicated research and development (R&D) capacity allows local innovation to build cumulatively on what is already known to work globally rather than rediscovering lessons independently. Digital integration, meanwhile, enables services to identify risk earlier and act collectively rather than sequentially.

These are not technical adjustments. They are the conditions under which prevention becomes possible. Ultimately, the stakes are not only operational but civic. Significant public resources are now invested in tackling homelessness. For that investment to retain public confidence, progress must become visible: fewer households entering homelessness, shorter stays in temporary accommodation, and the prevention of homelessness at predictable transition points such as leaving care or prison.

The latest statistics do not invalidate the homelessness strategy developed for England. They sharpen the challenge it now faces. The country has moved further than before in defining what should happen. The next phase is ensuring the machinery of government evolves quickly enough to make that ambition real.

The paradox revealed by the latest figures is therefore also an opportunity. England now has a far clearer understanding of the root causes of homelessness and the leverage points where change is most possible. The task ahead is to build a system capable of acting on that understanding: delivering better outcomes and better value for money for citizens and communities alike.

‍* Lígia Teixeira is Chief Executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact

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