Prevention is always better than cure but can we work ‘upstream’, long before before eviction becomes a threat?
It’s an uncomfortable truth: too often, help comes once people are mired in various crises, all but impossible to unpick. For people who face homelessness, it’s on top of triggers like family breakdown or mental ill-health, on top of financial disasters, on top of the all-consuming realisation that they’re losing their home.
Prevention protocols tend to kick in once an eviction notice has been served. Someone must reach the end of a long road into crisis before they qualify for support under statutory duties.
If help arrives at all, it’s when they no longer have the ability to take control for themselves. As with the overstretched health service, a lack of prevention and early intervention means problems escalate into emergency crises.
There are now increasing calls for an upstream prevention model, one that intervenes before eviction notices are served, homes are repossessed, or people end up sleeping rough. Espoused by Cardiff University researchers and policy bodies across the UK, upstream prevention offers a smarter, more humane, and cost-effective pathway to tackling homelessness at its roots. In Scotland, they’re a step ahead already – introducing a housing bill to pull on all the levers available to the state to spot risk early.
BUILT FOR CRISIS
The United Kingdom has the highest rate of people living in temporary accommodation among OECD countries. In January, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned of an overreliance on temporary housing to address homelessness, highlighting that a significant share of local spending is directed toward immediate support rather than essential preventative measures.
This concern is echoed in the Prevention Into Action report by Homeless Link, in partnership with Cardiff and Heriot-Watt universities, which exposes a stark imbalance in homelessness funding: only 0.7 per cent of homelessness funding is spent on upstream interventions, while 35 per cent is allocated to emergency-stage responses. Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick of Heriot-Watt’s I-SPHERE underlined the stakes: “A lack of early intervention has perpetuated a cycle of crisis, with devastating effects on individuals, families and communities.”
Traditional homelessness schemes act at crisis point, when legal duties are triggered or people are already on the streets. An upstream approach is different. It prioritises early intervention working across the population, focusing on high-risk groups and critical life transitions long before emergency measures are enforced.
SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE?
Cardiff University’s Upstream Cymru offers a powerful example. Operating in Welsh schools, the initiative embeds universal wellbeing screening and early referral systems. Surveys have been designed and rolled out to several schools in a pilot to identify young people from families at risk of breaking down, for example. Youth charity, Llamau, is leading on support to those individuals, helping divert them from well-worn routes into, first, housing need, and then homelessness. Shared data shows a striking 40 per cent reduction in youth homelessness and a 20 per cent drop in school dropout rates.
Cardiff’s accompanying research emphasises how “assistance must be moved upstream”, identifying those at risk before statutory crisis thresholds are reached. This echoes prevention research presented to European policy makers, that found identifying and supporting those leaving prison, care or hospital without housing is both cost-effective and morally imperative.
The Housing (Scotland) Bill has passed its second stage in the Scottish Parliament. It places a duty on public services to ‘ask and act’ – sensitively enquiring about the housing security of residents, customers and patients while accessing services. Local authorities will be expected to act within six months of a household’s possible homelessness.
CASH-FIRST INJECTIONS
Homelessness prevention is not a new concept, but upstream prevention goes beyond identifying at-risk groups moments before they reach crisis. It recognises that financial precarity such as low incomes, debt, or rent arrears are often the earliest sign of future homelessness.
Upstream models are gaining some policy momentum in the UK. The Scottish Government has recently launched their £1 million Upstream Homelessness Prevention Fund, a cash-first approach to help tenants stay housed, funding targeted rent support through local partnerships. Social Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville says, “This early intervention approach will help to minimise evictions by upstream prevention activity and identifying opportunities to build up support systems where they are needed.”
Building on this approach, recent evidence highlights the growing effectiveness of direct financial support or cash first interventions in upstream homelessness prevention. A landmark UK trial supported by the government and conducted by King’s College London and Greater Change is testing cash transfers to people at risk of homelessness. Initial findings reveal that modest cash injections not only help recipients cover rent deposits and clear debts but also result in significant public savings (theguardian.com).
For the past six years, Greater Change has proven the efficacy of unconditional cash transfers: for every £1,300 given, the public saves approximately £35,000, with 86 per cent of participants maintaining stable housing after 12 months. By intervening at the financial root, offering cash-based support, debt advice, or rent assistance, services can reduce the likelihood that people ever enter the homelessness system at all.
BLOCKAGES
All early intervention frameworks point to a central truth: money matters. Debt, unaffordable rent, and low incomes are all primary drivers of housing insecurity. Yet despite strong evidence, upstream models remain underfunded. The Prevention Into Action research flagged structural obstacles like short funding cycles, siloed data systems, and a culture of crisis management.
Homelessness and rough sleeping evaluators within The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) echoed this: fragmentation of funding, department-centric focus, and limited outcomes measurement hamper systemic shift (gov.uk). The sector awaits clear central leadership to align government departments, from health to education, justice to housing, around proactive, upstream prevention (orca.cardiff.ac.uk).
The post-Covid era and spiralling cost-of-living crisis offer an urgent imperative. Rising rents, welfare cuts, and pressure on mental health services demand a rethink of homelessness strategy. Even the MHCLG’s systems evaluation makes no bones about it: “Where funding remains focused on crisis, people continue to miss out on upstream support.”
Policymakers might already be listening. Mayoral Combined Authorities are experimenting with funding pools for holistic prevention. Foundations are shifting some budget lines from emergency provision to proactive programmes.
TIME TO RETHINK
But pockets of good practice will not be enough. We need a paradigm shift. Homelessness prevention should be a public health mission, with financial resilience viewed as a social determinant of sustainable housing. In some ways this is happening at the other end of homelessness, for new tenants, as housing providers’ schemes assess prospective tenants’ ability to afford their accommodation. It’s a form of prevention – reducing the risk of landlords needing to evict people later, but this is not diverting people on a precarious path already. For that, governments, funders and practitioners must align across sectors, not just funding emergency provision but funding resilience.
As Suzanne Fitzpatrick puts it, upstream prevention must become “a golden thread” in national homelessness strategy. Prevention isn’t just early support. It demands systemic reform.
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