The council’s five-year strategy (2020-25) to tackle homelessness in Herefordshire is approaching the end of its cycle.
Every local authority in England has to produce a five-year Homeless Prevention Strategy. For the past five years, our Housing team has been delivering against the 2020-25 strategy, in partnership with other agencies and groups. As we look towards the next five years, we want to hear your views on the progress we’ve achieved so far – and what you think we should focus on in the next five-year period (2026-2031).
We are inviting you to take part in a consultation, which is open now until 5pm on Tuesday 30 September. You can send us your views via a feedback questionnaire available on our website, which should take you less than 10 minutes to complete.
Our 2020-25 Homeless Prevention Strategy set out 14 priorities driving our efforts to reduce or prevent homelessness in our county. These included:
- Investigating opportunities to enter into a long-term lease arrangement with a private landlord to develop bespoke good quality temporary accommodation for vulnerable households.
- Strengthening our rough sleeper outreach and resettlement team by recruiting additional outreach workers who specialise in supporting rough sleepers.
- Working with key partners and developing our engagement and relationships with private sector landlords.
- Continuing to develop close collaborative working with voluntary and statutory sector partners in support of homelessness prevention.
- Seeking to reduce the number of households in temporary accommodation over the course of the strategy.
- Developing our understanding of factors that contribute to levels of homelessness in Herefordshire.
- Developing a homelessness prevention ‘toolkit’ for use in Talk Community Hubs.
Our assessment of our progress towards achievement of all these objectives is provided on our website via two documents: an Improvement Action Plan and a Review of Progress.
Councillor Carole Gandy, Cabinet Member for Adults, Health and Wellbeing at Herefordshire Council, said:
Our Housing team has made excellent progress in the past five years, delivering against the objectives set out in our 2020-2025 Homeless Prevention and Rough Sleeping Strategy.
We are proud of the additional funding we have secured with our partners over the past five years, which amounts to nearly £10 million. This has enabled us to purchase additional properties for use by vulnerable residents and to deliver services such as enhanced outreach addiction support and mental health support programmes. We’ve also been able to fund additional specialist outreach workers to help those at greatest risk of rough sleeping and homelessness.
Project Brave also deserves a particular mention. Originally developed as a multi-agency response to rough sleeping during the Covid-19 pandemic, this has now evolved into a three-tiered approach to rough sleeping and homelessness that has enabled us to significantly reduce the number of long-term rough sleepers in the county.
As we look towards the next five years, our aim is to continue to focus on those areas that will have the greatest impact on reducing and preventing homelessness in Herefordshire. We welcome residents’ views on where they think this focus should be.