Beyond rough sleeping: building a preventative approach to homelessness

Ligia Teixeira

Ligia is Chief Executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact and one of LGIU’s top thinkers in local government 2026.

Addressing all forms of homelessness

Local authorities in England may feel pulled in different directions on homelessness.

In December 2025, Ministers published A National Plan to End Homelessness – the first government strategy to address all types of homelessness. It spanned rough sleeping, unsafe accommodation, the record number of families in temporary housing, and hidden forms of homelessness such as ‘sofa surfing’. It set national targets for the three remaining years of this Parliament.

Fast forward to August this year, and Andy Burnham announced a national drive to end rough sleeping, with everyone affected to be offered a route off the streets by Christmas.

A contradiction? Not once we drill down into the details. In fact, Andy Burnham’s focus on ending rough sleeping – which was his first instruction to officials on entering Number 10 as Prime Minister – presents an opportunity for faster and bolder action on homelessness in all its forms.

This is a leader with extensive experience and deep commitment to homelessness. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he also began his tenure with a commitment to reducing street homelessness. But over time, his focus evolved into a comprehensive, systemic and prevention-focused approach guided by a test-and-learn methodology. He describes this ‘journey’, as he puts it, in a chapter for How To Use Evidence to End Homelessness, a collection of essays that Greg Hurst and I published in August.

It’s likely he will try something similar from Downing Street. He and his team are well aware that an ambition to get everyone off the streets by December would only be a first step, however bold; the challenge thereafter will be to maintain the progress made and pivot towards preventing the flow of new people onto the streets. As with the National Plan, the commitment to end rough sleeping will be funded over three years. Homelessness is also one of the areas being examined through the Treasury’s thematic value-for-money reviews ahead of the next Spending Review. That creates an important opportunity to ask not simply how much we spend, but whether money and accountability are organised in ways that enable earlier intervention.

It is clear, both from the National Plan and the PM’s announcements on rough sleeping, that homelessness is now acknowledged in government as not a challenge that can be fixed by housing policy alone. He spoke of offering ‘practical help with housing, health and other needs, helping people build a more stable future’. All arms of the state will be expected to do more and better, accompanied by an invitation to leaders from business, finance, charities, health and faith communities to step up.

Delivering lasting change

So the intention is there. The National Plan, too, embraces the principle of prevention.

The challenge, therefore, is one of delivery. Very few people disagree with upstream prevention in theory. But – as local authority leaders who hold legal duties on homelessness know only too well – crisis responses will continue to pull capacity and resources downstream unless systems are redesigned. Evidence shows that optimising prevention requires different incentives and different accountability metrics. Systems deliver the outcomes we want when we build the machinery required to deliver them.

This is why local homelessness strategies, and the action plans now required to accompany them, are so critical. The requirement should be treated as much more than another layer of compliance. Local authorities have an opportunity to use these plans to re-examine how their systems actually work: which pathways into homelessness can be redesigned, who, beyond housing, owns action, what information will tell leaders whether intervention is happening early enough, and how prevention capacity can be protected when crisis demand rises. At every opportunity, systems should align around positive outcomes for people that prevent harm, rather than coalescing within organisational boundaries.

The role of Mayoral Strategic Authorities

There is an important regional layer too. Mayoral Strategic Authorities can increasingly provide capabilities that individual councils may struggle to develop on their own, such as building a broader picture from data, coordinating across boundaries, supporting learning, and, where it makes sense, commissioning collectively. The opportunity is to create a golden thread between national ambition, regional capability and delivery and local delivery, while remaining clear about where statutory responsibility sits.

The prevention challenge for local leaders

Time and again we hear from local leaders who hold statutory responsibility for homelessness that the pressure from ever-rising demand means they lack the ‘head space’ to reflect on how they might do things differently. 

We hear, too, that the pull of resources into crisis management, exemplified by record numbers of households in temporary accommodation, means many councils are losing the institutional memory for what effective early prevention work entails: tenancy sustainment, legal assistance, debt management, liaison with landlords, relationship support, benefits advice. These are skilled interventions and require time to do them well.

It’s tough for leaders to carve out and protect time for their teams to undertake upstream prevention work – but it is vital they do so if we are to break out this cycle of record homelessness spending producing ever-worse outcomes. We also need leaders with both the courage to innovate and the humility to test the impact of new approaches by independent evaluation, which may mean working in partnership with other authorities – and creating the conditions for learning across places rather than asking every council to solve the same problems independently. 

The need for collective action

But the responsibility cannot fall on councils alone. National government must create the conditions in which prevention is possible: funding that is sufficiently flexible and predictable, meaningful responsibilities across other public services, better access to information and fundamentally, an adequate supply of suitable housing. The test of a truly preventative system is not whether the service becomes better at catching people before crisis but whether fewer people are passed towards that service in the first place.