Actions fall short of ambition in the government’s new homelessness strategy

Despite the number of households in temporary accommodation reaching record highs, England had no long-term strategy to tackle homelessness – until last week. The new national plan is ambitious in its vision. It moves beyond a narrow focus on rough sleeping, puts overdue emphasis on prevention and improved public service co-ordination, and commits to a ‘test and learn’ programme that allows local areas to trial new approaches and share evidence on what works – all things the Institute for Government has called for previously.

But while the government has set broadly the right destination for the system, the actions it proposes ⁶ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, A National Plan to End Homelessness, CP 1452, The Stationery Office, 11 December 2025, www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-national-plan-to-end-homelessness/a-national-plan-to-end-homelessness  aren’t enough to get it there. To tackle homelessness effectively, it must do more to address the systemic barriers to taking a preventative approach.

Accountability for the strategy requires a clear definition of ‘prevention’

A clear and workable definition of ‘prevention’ is a necessary starting point for building a preventative system, yet the homelessness strategy fails to set one out. Without knowing what it is aiming for on prevention, the government cannot properly assess its progress on the strategy, let alone adjust course if its approach proves ineffective. The ambiguity also risks undermining the cross-government working the strategy relies on, as departments work to different interpretations of prevention.

The lack of clarity on prevention will have the biggest effect on local delivery. Public services – particularly local authorities – are already stretched to breaking point, with acute and immediate demand absorbing most of their attention and resources. Under this pressure, services are likely to interpret their responsibilities on homelessness prevention narrowly, prioritising their more acute statutory duties over earlier intervention. In practice, much of the activity councils describe as homelessness ‘prevention’ takes the form of paying landlords to keep households in their homes. This is unlikely to be what ministers have in mind, but without setting clearer expectations they will struggle to challenge those decisions and redirect spending further upstream.  

The strategy fails to address the root causes of poor public service co-ordination  

Nearly half of the overall increase in homelessness duties since 2019 is linked to people leaving asylum accommodation or institutional settings, such as custody or hospital. In recognition of this, the government introduced a new ‘duty to collaborate’ for key public services involved in homelessness support and prevention, and announced a long-term ambition that no one should leave a public institution into homelessness.

But experience from other services suggests this will not be enough. Similar duties exist in children’s social care, where integrated care boards and police forces have been safeguarding partners of local authorities since 2017. Yet co-ordination between these agencies – particularly between health services and councils – appears to have worsened over that period.  

Instead, the main barriers to public service co-ordination are structural. Siloed funding, policy design and delivery models incentivise agencies to push activity into another service, regardless of the overall cost to the taxpayer. The government has already taken some steps to remove these barriers, by, for example, reducing the number of small, time-limited pots of money in local government to increase flexibility over how money is spent. But the homelessness strategy makes little additional progress on this front, and in some respects reinforces siloed delivery by placing responsibility for its progress at a local level entirely on councils. Real improvement will require wider reforms, such as creating mechanisms to hold other services accountable for their role in delivering the strategy and pooling budgets across local services.

The homelessness strategy also does little to improve data sharing between public services. The Home Office has committed to ensuring councils are notified when newly granted refugees are at risk of homelessness, but in many cases this will only give 28 days’ notice. That falls far short of the 56-day window councils use to prevent homelessness, limiting the value of the data. Moreover, the Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS made no comparable commitments on data sharing, despite data on benefits and health being particularly important for identifying people at future risk of homelessness.  

The government must be careful not to undervalue local analytical capacity

Local areas will need vastly improved analytic capacity to deliver central government’s ambition for the homelessness system. Ending the use of bed and breakfasts as temporary accommodation for families – one of the strategy’s key targets – requires councils to use local data to shape their temporary accommodation stock strategically, while early identification of people at risk of homelessness is technically complex. Many councils, however, lack even the forecasting capabilities to track macro trends in local demand.

The homelessness strategy contains few measures to correct this. Its National Workforce Programme ⁸ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, ‘National Workforce Programme: prospectus’, GOV.UK, 12 November 2025, retrieved 16 December 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-workforce-programme-prospectus/national-workforce-programme-prospectus  appears to focus on frontline staff, neglecting critical back-office functions such as analytics. Instead, the reforms rely on central government ‘adviser teams’ to help councils make better use of data. This is unlikely to provide the sustained capacity the strategy requires – and is an inefficient way to build it.

The government should be praised for its ambition, but the homelessness strategy risks remaining aspirational unless it fills in the missing detail and implements wider reforms to funding and delivery models.