There’s no room for complacency for anyone working on homelessness in the UK.  As members of the Centre for Homelessness Impact board and management got together to discuss our strategy for the next four years, the overwhelming question was what could we do to make an even bigger difference.

We did take stock of what has been achieved over our six years as a What Works Centre.  

The evidence base has grown: there are more studies worldwide, and studies that we have led or commissioned ourselves, focused on the UK. Our Evidence and Gap Maps and Intervention Tool make this evidence base accessible to busy practitioners, and our Evidence Notes synthesise and summarise the latest findings so that they can be put to immediate and practical use.  

The Ending Rough Sleeping Data Framework, co-produced by the Centre for Homelessness Impact, a group of ‘early adopter’ local areas and the the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, provides a consistent set of data across England, based on a definition of what it means to end homelessness.  

The government-funded Test & Learn and Systems-wide Evaluation programme is well under way, with eight separate evaluations which will start generating findings this year. The report for the first phase of the Systems-wide Evaluation was published by MHCLG in February, and has already influenced government thinking, such as in consolidating funding streams for homelessness prevention.  

To support implementation, we have worked with hundreds of local authorities across the whole of the UK to help leaders, managers and front-line staff understand and act upon the evidence that we can and use their data to guide their work and track their progress.

Through events and other communications, we have spread the word about the importance of evidence, and created a photo library of images of homelessness to help combat stigma.

But for all our efforts, and those of our colleagues at the front line, the fact is that homelessness in the UK has got worse rather than better. The annual count showed that 4,667 people slept rough in England in November 2024, 20% up on the previous year. Around the same time, 126,040 households were in temporary accommodation, and we know that many more people living in precarious circumstances, such as ‘sofa surfing’ are not captured by official data.  The position in the other countries of the UK is similar.  And of course we don’t need statistics to tell us what we can see with our own eyes.

So the big challenge for us was how to do better still.  We are as determined as ever to focus on our mission of ending homelessness for good.  And we are sticking to our role as a catalyst for evidence-based change: we’re not getting into service delivery or seeking to grow for growth’s sake.  What we are doing is focusing harder on three areas of work which are crucial to lasting change.

Three priorities to guide our work

The strategy that we have agreed for the coming years will focus on three pillars. 

First, we’ll be focusing more on prevention, and will work to expand access to evidence and data to drive a shift to this ‘turn’ away from crisis response to upstream prevention.  Everywhere I’ve worked, public and third sector, organisations want to do more on prevention, but it’s not easy to carve out resources from hard-pressed current budgets, especially if the finance team (where I used to sit, mostly) are pressing for the evidence that the prevention work will actually make a noticeable difference.  That’s our first priority: clear and actionable evidence on prevention, plus help to measure the impact.

Second, collaboration.  As the systems work progresses, and as we bring together insights from other studies, it’s ever clearer that really ending homelessness will need a systems approach, so that problems solved in one area don’t pop up in another.  We will work with partners in regions within the UK where rates of homelessness are highest to help build a more strategic and joined up response, and so enhance collective impact. Again, collaboration is a familiar theme, but most of us know it’s easier said than done.  Our role will be to work with leaders at all levels, to show the evidence of why it matters, and support the use of that evidence.

The third priority is experimentation and learning.  Many of the underlying reasons for homelessness are consistent, but the immediate causes vary from year to year and from locality to locality.  So we need a culture of continual experimentation to adapt approaches and learn as we go along.  That doesn’t mean “letting a thousand flowers bloom”, but following planned changes to an approach, and learning the lessons.  We will help local managers to do that, and to share learning with others.

It's a big agenda.  It’s one we can only attempt in partnership with front-line practitioners, senior leaders, researchers, and governments.  What gives me the most confidence is the determination of the colleagues that I meet at our events and elsewhere, to make a real difference.  The most resilient of all are the people who themselves experience homelessness.  We owe it to them to do our utmost to end homelessness for good.

• Andrew Hudson is Chair of the Centre for Homelessness Impact

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