Labour must learn from the Covid-era Everyone In scheme to end homelessness

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

This phrase, believed to be an African proverb, has gained a lot of traction in recent years having been shared by world-renowned figures including Hillary Clinton and the former captain of the Brazilian national football team Thiago Silva.

The proverb quite rightly serves to help demonstrate the value of collaboration and the need for people to work together to achieve things.

I raise this as the mayor of London Sadiq Khan is currently working on a plan of action to establish a “shared mission” for ending rough sleeping in the capital.

Concurrently, the government is also working on its long-term homelessness strategy, which is due to be published later this year following the multi-year spending review.

And Sadiq is right. Ending rough sleeping has to be a shared mission as it simply cannot be achieved by the mayor alone.

If we are to end rough sleeping, we need a whole systems approach which involves the mayor, national government departments, local government, health services and the entire homelessness sector all pulling together.

However, I’ve recently been asking myself if this African proverb is really an either/or question.

Do we have any examples of teams going both far and fast?

I believe we do.

We have an exceptional example in the homelessness sector which I think we can look back at and continue to learn from.

This month marks five years since Luke Hall MP – then minister for local government and homelessness – wrote to every local authority in England asking them to urgently accommodate every person sleeping rough on the streets.

This directive led to local authorities, the police, health services and homelessness providers all working together with extraordinarily speed to achieve a shared goal.

The result, supported by significant government funding, was that more than 37,000 people affected by homelessness in England were housed in hotels and other forms of emergency accommodation through the Everyone In programme.

Not only did people work together and work fast to achieve this excellent cumulative result but the way services were delivered also meant working together quickly for a prolonged period to achieve results. 

In 2020, Riverside produced an evaluation report having interviewed people brought off the streets in Manchester during Everyone In. The evaluation highlighted how we were able to build trust with people who had been sleeping rough and demonstrated the importance of speed in helping to quickly improve a person’s circumstances.

Everyone In brought a high-level of coordination between agencies, such as health, housing, finances and benefits enabled us to work together to deliver improvements in the wellbeing of people who came off the streets at greater speed. This also enabled us to build further trust with our customers.

As an example, by accelerating access to some services such as prescriptions, and support to end substance misuse and support to apply for benefits, Everyone In taught us some valuable lessons.

When our staff were less inhibited by bureaucracy, they were able to address people’s needs more immediately and therefore also more effectively.

By enabling people to address health issues, both mental and physical, and substance misuse issues speedily, our staff were able to help bring about a noticeable change in a person’s physical and psychological wellbeing more quickly.

The success of these highly coordinated interventions during Everyone In has seen Riverside and partners build on this when creating the Street Engagement Hub in Manchester post-Covid. As reported by Big Issue, the Street Engagement Hub sees police work to bring in people who have been sleeping rough or begging, off the street and enables them to access a whole host of organisations together under one roof.

This required Greater Manchester Police to change their approach to begging to become more engaging and less punitive as hotel security staff learned during Everyone In.

This brings services including St John’s Ambulance, the Manchester Mental Health and Homeless Team, ARC (the Abstinence and Recovery Centre), Riverside, Big Issue and DWP together to try and help rapidly improve people’s physical and mental wellbeing.

Most people living rough on the streets are living with some form of trauma. And most find themselves in that situation because at some point in their lives their trust in a key relationship has been broken.

It is not easy to rebuild trust with a person whose trust has been broken.

However, as Everyone In showed, if we bring all the services together under one roof we can work together more quickly and easily and guarantee people’s access to services. This helps us to further build a relationship of trust rather than seeing it eroded by a person having to wait weeks and sometimes months for support they need.

Moving away from Everyone In, I think perhaps the most heartening thing to hear about Sadiq’s action plan prior to publication is that, for the first time, a significant focus on preventing rough sleeping will be built into services.

This focus on prevention is immensely important given that the most recent annual Chain data showed 7,974 people were seen sleeping rough for the first time in 2023/24 – equivalent to two-thirds of people seen sleeping rough in London.

However, even when we prevent rough sleeping from occurring, we still need to help people sleeping rough on the streets now, including people who are more entrenched and those deemed to be living on the streets.

I have said before that I believe that the number of people sleeping rough in England is a growing humanitarian and health emergency.

If we treat rough sleeping more like a health emergency – and we have the political will like we did during Everyone In – we have proven, we can all work together to go both far and fast to help end the scourge of rough sleeping in England.

Let’s work together to do it again.

John Glenton is the executive director of care and support at Riverside.

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