Removing the need for evictions, and helping tenants to tackle their debts, deserves investment
You can’t count what hasn’t happened, right? So how do we win funding for stopping crises from taking place? And who are Clean Slate’s natural partners when it comes to preventing poverty, destitution and homelessness?
I spoke last year at a conference run by Homeless Link on prevention. The keynote speakers talked about working ‘upstream’, not waiting for the red flags warning of pending evictions. This led neatly on to my workshop where I presented on how a Money Health Check at the right time could catch people when the wheels are wobbling but before they’ve come off. I described our programme and how, to reach scale, we would work with delivery partners across the UK. About 30 of the 40 attendees signed up for (and received) more information but no one came back to us. The problem is homelessness agencies work with homeless people, not people who might one day have become homeless.
We know that in addition to financial crises, those most at risk of homelessness are people with mental health issues, experiencing relationship/ family breakdown and/or turning to substance use to cope. Aligning with agencies supporting people displaying these red flags would help us catch people when the wheels are wobbling. But if these agencies are about prevention, it’s still not about homelessness. Talk to them about financial resilience and they’ll offer to refer people who say they’re struggling. In our experience, by then it’s too late. If we can get in early before people are seeking help, as a free Money Health Check service open to anyone, we can spot the missing knowledge, facilities or mindset to put them on a preventative path. Otherwise, it’s just another crisis intervention they’ll end up receiving with limited scope for coaching them sustainably away from risk.
On Easter Tuesday Clean Slate published a Landlords Pack. It lays out the business case for investing in money guidance services for struggling tenants: For the cost-saving from one eviction prevented, we can work with 100 tenants in difficulties. We can also reduce the time it takes people falling into debt to access formal debt advice from 12-18 months to six to eight weeks. With evidence from our work with Stonewater Housing, who refer 1,000 tenants to us a year, we could also show that 77 per cent of struggling tenants who were not already in debt advice at the start were debt free or receiving help by the end of our programme. The unique way we address 25 financial resilience indicators, and record the distance travelled by the end of our service, gives us seriously defensible impact data to take to stakeholders.
These statistics about preventing evictions, reducing access times and people taking action on their debts and arrears form a compelling business case for investment. We can also show the human impact of this support, including starting a plan to find work, improving digital skills and overcoming food insecurity. And by understanding the cost and rates of evictions, we can start talking about how we reduce homelessness even where it hasn’t happened yet.
We will be developing the Impact Survey we ask all service completers to fill in. We will more robustly gather feedback on clients’ improved wellbeing and family relationships, for example. This will help us also take a case for collaboration to wellbeing and family support services, and their commissioners, so we can catch people there too.
Innovations come rarely within homelessness services. It’s probably on account of the relentless tide of people falling into it and organisations’ age-old struggle to find capacity to get ahead. I really believe our scalable Money Health Check process, however, offers something exciting to stakeholders. But there is a need for vision too: Prevention of anything doesn’t belong to one sector, we have to understand the pathways people come along to end up in poverty, destitution or with nowhere to live, and we have to commandeer the engagement points. We have to focus on indicators, drawing on experience of well-trodden paths. And we have to make a case for how the reduction in red flags is a credible indicator of a reduction in the worst outcomes. That is to say, prevention in action.
