The Centre for Homelessness Impact, a new dedicated body focused on preventing and tackling homelessness, has launched very recently. What are its most immediate goals?

The Centre is an independent organisation focused on championing the creation and use of reliable research to help accelerate progress towards a future without homelessness in the UK. 

It is a crucial time for homelessness in the UK. After years of neglect, there is real momentum and political will. The key challenge in a country like ours is to ensure that when we try to help people affected by homelessness we do so as effectively as possible; to ensure they exit homelessness for good. 

Our ambition is to create that infrastructure, with the right outcomes framework and tools to accelerate progress through better use of evidence and data, applying scientific methods to improve our understanding of what works and pushing for a culture shift towards evidence-based solutions. We also advocate for a more collaborative and networked approach, bringing together academics, change-makers and third sector professionals from different sectors and disciplines to work together towards a future without homelessness.

What are the Centre’s top priorities?

Our work focuses on three main areas:

• Increasing the reliability and accessibility of research about homelessness, ensuring the evidence is relevant, accurate and actionable. 
• Creating new tools that place accurate and actionable evidence at the fingertips of the people we want to influence, and to help decision-makers ask the right questions and make better decisions.
• Supporting leading professionals to act on evidence more promptly. In the health sector for example, according to The Lancet, there is a period of about 17 years between new evidence on an intervention becoming available and when it is acted upon. We hope to considerably reduce that gap.  

This year, we are also piloting a leadership programme with Clore Social to support people in the field who are at the beginning of their careers, helping them to build the necessary skills to use data and evidence to achieve better results.

The number of rough sleepers in London rose by 18 per cent this year. What are the main reasons behind this sharp increase? 

Homelessness is a very complex issue. There is always a combination of structural and individual factors that lead to people being on the streets. It might be that a crisis incident pushes them over the edge, but the situation that brings them to that point builds up over a number of years.

In terms of structural factors, we know that the lack of affordable housing is a massive issue, particularly in London. We also know that welfare cuts and changes are making homelessness worse. Increased conditionality is also having an impact. International evidence suggests that the stronger the safety net, the less likely people are to end up on the streets.  

According to government figures, homelessness across the UK has also been rising for the past seven years. What can be done to reverse this trend?

We need a housing system that leaves no one behind, to build more social housing and make use of innovative housing interventions to ensure there are more affordable homes that people can access. We also need to design smart policies and programmes, ensure that they are underpinned by the best available evidence. Another focus needs to be the development of a person-centred services that focus on understanding and responding to individual needs earlier on. Finally we know that we must make ending homelessness a shared priority because its not something the homelessness sector on its own can solve.

Resources and leadership matter, but as there will always be a limited amount the vital thing is to ensure that we’re finding what things do the most good and to do those first.

That’s why we’re determined to help to create the infrastructure necessary to tackle homelessness effectively. To accelerate progress we have to get better at finding out the real impact of interventions to ensure the implementation of successful and cost-effective measures.

In your opinion, what are the main barriers to bridging the gap between researchers and policymakers?

In order to turn knowledge into practice, research needs to be actionable and, unfortunately, that is not always the case. In many occasions, the conclusions and recommendations of research studies are valid and sound, but very hard to implement.

It’s not easy for busy policy-makers to access and assess evidence, and how findings are framed and communicated are also hugely important. And in a complex world evidence will only ever be one of the factors informing decision-making.

In homelessness at least, one of the things that would help bridge the gap would be to invest more in new types of evidence that are about testing new solutions to well evidenced problems. Not near enough is invested in implementation and disciplines such as behavioural science and service design offer a pathway to implement some of the great research we have about the causes and consequences of homelessness. 

This interview was conducted in 2018