Many of us in the UK have been enjoying the change of season with the sun and spring firmly making its presence felt. It's also put me in a reflective mood, thinking of new beginnings and back to our public launch of the Test & Learn programme last year.  On April 2, 2024 we launched our first call for Evaluators to support us to understand the impact of the eight Test and Learn projects. Six days later we opened applications to either host or deliver the projects.

Over the next couple of months we launched 12 different schemes and we began partnerships with 54 successful delivery organisations: 38 local authorities, 13 voluntary community and social enterprise organisations, and two companies, to support the delivery of the projects over 71 areas of England. They were joined by six Evaluators and our data collection partner IFF.

During the summer it was CHI’s pleasure to bring everyone together to coordinate the work with our new partners alongside the evaluators. We finalised the details of how we were going to deliver the projects to support people at risk of or experiencing homelessness and rough sleeping, while also ensuring we created and delivered robust and meaningful evaluations to help the policy makers of the future.

To recap, the Test and Learn programme is the first of its kind in the world, commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to trial innovative approaches and test what works to reduce homelessness and rough sleeping. We at CHI won the contract to conduct an initial feasibility study and then, through a tendering process, we were appointed as delivery agency to run the three-year programme. Its footprint is only in England, but it remains our ambition to work with partners to replicate and evaluate some of the interventions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Every team member in CHI has been involved in some way. Our Programmes team has been the driving force of each project and recently have been joined on this with our Implementation team to support our efforts. Our Evidence and Data team has been working with the Evaluators to refine their approaches and help the delivery and referral partners implement the evaluation requirements. Our Communication team has been sharing stories of people who are receiving the services and keeping the wider sector updated via videos and our newsletter. Our Operations team has kept the programme ticking over, remember most of the £12 million is being spent on service delivery and we needed to get that money out to partners! 

‍Success requires many partners

Beyond the CHI team it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that hundreds of people have been working on the Test and Learn programme over the past year.  When I say that we are working with 54 organisations, that really is at least three to five people per organisation, and a similar number with our eight evaluation teams.  Each organisation has had to bring on board their governance, data protection, finance and legal teams to support the implementation. 

In the Autumn and Winter of 2024 we were doing lots of work with them behind the scenes to get the project ready to launch.  This involved creating new partnerships to deliver the projects. For instance, in our Outreach Health project, which is testing the impact of having a nurse in outreach teams to address the health needs of people sleeping rough, all the nurses are being employed by Change Grow Live but they work within eight existing outreach rough sleeping teams. The nature of this evaluation means we are also collecting data from another eight local areas, as the control group. 

MHCLG have also been involved throughout, offering their expertise, their enthusiasm, and ensuring collectively that we are gaining the most useful learning from the trials.

Next week we will launch the last of our Test and Learn projects as we start outbound phone calls to households identified at risk of homelessness through the Using Data to Prevent Homelessness project.  I can say with some confidence (as a previous local authority employee) that it is a truly monumental effort from those LAs to integrate the brand new software to draw information from multiple datasets across directorates within the Council and some outside it. It’ll be analysed by Xantura, our delivery partner, and then the details will come back to teams to start making telephone calls with offers of targeted support, with the aim of preventing homelessness. All this is happening in less than 10 months after they were selected to participate!

It’s too early in the process to think about the long term outcomes of the projects. We’ll come to that next summer.  Perhaps I can point to some green shoots though - what we are hearing already is the impact the projects are having at an immediate individual level. Through our evaluation of Personalised Budgets, people are being supported in their new homes; people affected by homelessness are gaining employment through our evaluation of the Individual Placement and Support model; our evaluation of offering accommodation and support for people with uncertain immigration status who have been rough sleeping has led people to get positive immigration decisions; accommodation and extra support is being offered to people a local connection in an area; and people who are moving into accommodation are also being matched to volunteers to test the impact of this type of support. 

What I can also see is that, across the homelessness sector and beyond, there is an appetite to try new approaches to support people at risk of, or experiencing homelessness, a willingness to do this while undertaking robust evaluations to see whether they work. Crucially, there is an absolute commitment that we must do this at pace, because we need to.

• Graeme Gardner is Head of Programmes at the Centre for Homelessness Impact

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