I was delighted to be in Liverpool to attend an event to launch Liverpool City Region’s Homelessness Task Force. It was great to hear speeches by Steve Rotheram, the city region’s mayor, and Cllr Graham Morgan, the leader of Knowsley council who will chair the Task Force, in which they spoke of their commitment to preventing homelessness.  

I know how much work went into getting to that point, and I think Liverpool City Region deserves real credit, particularly for the ambition to move beyond talking about what needs to change and actually putting it into practice.

And the timing could hardly be more important.

We have a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who has made ending rough sleeping one of his first priorities, with a commitment to offer everyone sleeping rough in England a route off the streets by Christmas.

I think that’s enormously welcome. And there’s something particularly interesting about having a Prime Minister who, until very recently, was himself a metro mayor, and who understands both the potential of regional leadership and the frustrations of trying to get different parts of government pulling in the same direction.

It’s an unusual political opportunity, and one we should make the most of.

But when I heard the Christmas announcement, alongside my excitement, I found myself asking a slightly less festive question.

What happens next Christmas? And the Christmas after that?

Because helping everyone off the streets this winter would be a tremendous achievement. But if we find ourselves having to do exactly the same thing year after year, we haven’t really changed the underlying problem.

And I think that gets to the heart of the role of Liverpool City Region’s homelessness Task Force. The launch event took place within sight of the River Mersey, which seemed rather appropriate, because there’s an image I often come back to when thinking about homelessness.

Imagine we’re standing beside a river and we see people who have fallen in the water, struggling in the current and being swept downstream.

Naturally, our first instinct is to rescue them. If more people fall in, we’d do the same. And over time, we might become extremely good at it. We train more people, develop better rescue techniques, invest in better equipment.

But imagine that, despite all those efforts, more and more people keep appearing in the water.

At some point, surely, we’d want to go upstream and find out why so many people were falling in.

And I think that’s rather where we find ourselves with homelessness in this country.

We have some extraordinary services and people doing remarkable work helping those already experiencing homelessness. We need to keep investing in that work and improving it.

But unless we also become much better at preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place, we’re never going to get ahead of the problem.

And the national figures illustrate this rather starkly.

Last autumn, nearly 4,800 people were estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in England, the highest number since the current records began.

Across the North West of England, the increase was 20 per cent in just one year.

And rough sleeping is only the most visible part of the problem. At the end of March, more than 135,000 households were living in temporary accommodation in England, including over 177,000 children.

Now, I know none of this will surprise many of you. You see the reality behind these figures every day.

But what troubles me is the paradox they reveal.

We know more about homelessness than ever before. We have better evidence, dedicated professionals, increasingly sophisticated services and enormous amounts of public money going into the response.

And yet we can be spending more, working harder, even improving individual services, while the overall problem continues to get worse.

That doesn’t mean those efforts aren’t making a difference. Imagine how much worse things might be without them.

But it does mean we need to do something more fundamental.

And I want to be clear about one thing. The answer isn’t to stop rescuing people downstream while we work out how to prevent them falling in upstream.

We have to become better at doing both.

And that is a much more difficult challenge than it might initially appear.

Which is why, when you hear someone say that ending homelessness isn’t rocket science, don’t believe them. I would argue the evidence suggests it may actually be harder.

Rocket science has one enormous advantage: the laws of physics are reasonably predictable. Gravity behaves the same way in Liverpool as it does in Manchester. People and institutions don’t. Homelessness is shaped by many other factors, all interacting in ways that can be extraordinarily difficult to anticipate or control. Sometimes one part of government can be spending money trying to prevent homelessness while another part is making decisions that increase the risk of it.

And this isn’t necessarily because anyone is doing anything wrong within their own area of responsibility. A hospital can be doing its job, a prison can be doing its job, a council can be doing its job, and yet the way those systems interact can still leave someone without a home.

Think about somebody leaving prison. We generally know when they’re going to be released. That shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone. Yet people still leave prison with nowhere safe to live.

And sometimes even the choices people make, which appear irrational from the outside, make perfect sense when you understand their circumstances. We occasionally hear that someone has chosen to sleep rough because they’ve refused an offer of accommodation. But what if that accommodation feels unsafe? What if they’ve had a terrible experience of somewhere similar before? I suspect some of us might make exactly the same choice.

These are genuinely complicated human problems. But here’s the important distinction. Complexity doesn’t mean inevitability.

We know a great deal about the circumstances in which people become homeless. We can often identify risks long before someone reaches crisis point.

Yet we haven’t become consistently good at turning that knowledge into effective prevention.

In other words, homelessness can be predictable without yet being preventable in practice. And that suggests we have a system that isn’t learning or adapting quickly enough. 

And this is where I think the political moment we’re in offers real possibilities.

For the first time in a long time, we have a national homelessness strategy that puts prevention much more firmly at the heart of the response, alongside the urgent need to improve people’s experiences when homelessness does happen.

We also have growing recognition that homelessness cannot be solved by housing and homelessness services alone. Other parts of government need to take responsibility too.

These are important changes.

But we’ve had strategies and ambitious commitments before, and we’ve learned that having the right ambitions isn’t the same as achieving the right results.

There are things only national government can do, particularly around affordable housing, welfare and the way public services are funded. We cannot expect councils to compensate indefinitely for problems created elsewhere. But equally, national government cannot design every solution from Whitehall.

And I think one of the biggest opportunities now is to connect national ambition with the practical knowledge and leadership that exist locally and regionally.

Because the problem isn’t a shortage of people who understand the importance of prevention. It’s how to make prevention happen in practice, consistently and at sufficient scale, while continuing to improve the response for people who need help today.

And that is much easier said than done. It’s a very tall order.

It means creating the time, skills, information and infrastructure that allow people to work across organisational boundaries, test different approaches and learn from the results.

Because I don’t believe we’re short of good intentions. And we’re certainly not short of people who care deeply about homelessness. But we haven’t yet built a system that consistently learns from what works, recognises what doesn’t, and uses that knowledge to improve at the pace we need. We need a system that doesn’t just work harder every year. We need one that gets better at getting better.

And that’s precisely why I think initiatives like Liverpool City Region's Homelessness Task Force matter so much.

Not because Liverpool has suddenly discovered the importance of prevention or collaboration. There’s already excellent work happening across the city region, and has been for many years.

But because this task force offers an opportunity to build on those efforts, and to tackle some of the barriers that no individual council or organisation can overcome on its own. Homelessness doesn’t respect council boundaries. Neither do housing markets or the public services that shape people’s lives. And one of the great opportunities of working at city-region level is that you can begin to bring together some of those different responsibilities, resources and perspectives.

At the Centre for Homelessness Impact, we’ve been working with partners in London and Greater Manchester on similar challenges.

And one thing we’ve learned is that bringing people together is important, but it is only the beginning. The real test is what happens afterwards. Whether we start making decisions differently, whether we try things we haven’t tried before, whether we’re willing to challenge some of our assumptions, and whether we can show that people’s lives are actually improving as a result.

That’s what I particularly welcome about Liverpool’s determination to focus on delivery.

And the opportunities are practical.

How do we improve access to suitable housing and support for people who need it today? How can we use information more intelligently to identify people at risk and intervene earlier? How do we equip the workforce with the skills and support to do things differently? And how do we know whether the changes we’re making are actually having the impact we intended?

The Task Force will help create the conditions for people to work through those questions together, test new approaches, learn quickly and, crucially, turn that learning into better outcomes.

And I think there’s an even bigger opportunity here. Liverpool City Region has the potential not simply to make progress locally, but to help demonstrate to the rest of the country what a genuinely preventative approach to homelessness looks like in practice.

To show what becomes possible when national ambition, regional leadership and local knowledge come together, and to help identify the barriers that national government still needs to remove.

That’s what being a trailblazer can mean. Not having all the answers, but being willing to find them, to demonstrate what works, and to help others learn from that experience.

I hope this Task Force becomes a place where that knowledge really counts. Where people feel able to challenge familiar assumptions, try things differently, and be honest when something isn’t working.

I’ll finish where I started, with Christmas.

Of course I hope we succeed in helping everyone sleeping rough this winter find somewhere safe to go. That matters enormously.

But the bigger test will come afterwards. Will fewer people become homeless in the first place? Will we be better at helping those who do find a home they can keep? And will fewer people find themselves coming back into homelessness?

Imagine if, a few years from now, we could answer those questions with confidence. And imagine if Liverpool City Region were one of the places that helped demonstrate how to make that happen.

That would be an extraordinary achievement, not just for Liverpool, but for the country.

And I think that’s an ambition worth getting behind.

• Ligia Teixeira is Chief Executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact