We are pleased to announce that our work has been published in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s first report from the system-wide evaluation of its services on homelessness and rough sleeping. We are working with the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) and other partners on the evaluation, the first of its kind globally to take a whole-government approach to exploring the effects of policies and practices on homelessness.

Our contributions to this report include a revamp of CHI’s system map of the drivers of homelessness, classifying government programmes according to the Intervention Level Framework, and ensuring that systems thinking is applied throughout. We were invited to join the consortium because of our expertise in using systems approaches to evaluate complex social challenges.

The principal recommendation from the evaluation at this stage, is that there should be a cross-government focus on the prevention of homelessness rather than crisis relief. The report, published by MHCLG, shows that:

• The government spends most money and effort on crisis relief as opposed to preventing homelessness.
• The emphasis on crisis relief means that there is little attempt to enact system-level improvements.
• Many other challenges compete for priority with homelessness on both the level of individuals and policy priorities.
• Despite examples of strong local partnership working on homelessness and rough sleeping more coordination could be done.

‍Some findings from the report are already influencing government thinking, including the idea of consolidating funding and programmes to improve effectiveness.