Squeezed local authority budgets have meant that money has increasingly been focused on emergency services rather than prevention and ongoing support. This isn’t a criticism of councils who are trying to make ends meet, but we know that the best thing to do is to help people keep the homes they have. So prevention and support need proper funding. Emergency work is vital but on its own it won’t solve homelessness.
At The Salvation Army we have seen real success in helping people tackle the reasons they became homeless in the first place. We find out what help a person needs to break the cycle of homelessness which can be everything from trauma informed addiction support to practical help like employment skills training. We our motivated by our mission to ensure everyone should be able to live life to the full but helping people into independent living doesn’t just transform individual lives but also saves money down the track.
As well as investing in people, there are systemic changes that as a country we also need to make. For example, having a stable home needs to be more affordable. The extra funding for affordable housing announced in the UK government’s October budget was hugely welcome, and we hope that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland governments will also spend the extra funding that they receive as a result on homes that people can afford. However, we are enormously disappointed that the chancellor decided to keep the freeze on housing benefits from 2025. This is going to have really serious consequences for people renting in the private sector.
Housing benefits are supposed to ensure that people on low incomes – whether wages, benefits, or a mix of the two- can afford the cheapest 30% of homes, for their household size, in their local area. To do this they have to reflect actual rent levels.
In the year to September 2024, private sector rents increased by 8.4% on average across the UK. We have calculated that the decision to freeze the housing benefits will leave many households with a shortfall of £100 per month. The expansion of affordable housing will take time to come through, and the private rented sector will continue to be an important part of our housing economy. So the government needs to reverse the housing benefit freeze as a matter of urgency.
Finally, we need to know more about who is experiencing homelessness if we are to make sure that services really meet people’s needs. Chain, the Greater London rough sleeping database, should be the model for other data collection systems in other areas with high numbers of rough sleepers; and we need to know more about changing experiences of homelessness.
So, what’s the outlook for 2025? Homelessness has continued to rise year on year, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Everybody agrees that we need to make homelessness rare, brief, and unrepeated. Let’s make that our New Year’s resolution – and do whatever it takes to make it happen.
Nick Redmore is the director of The Salvation Army Homeless Services
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