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No Second Night Out goes national

September 16 2011
 Scheme gets £20m cash for expansion

 

The No Second Night Out scheme has received a £20m boost to roll out across England.

Just four months into the pilot at London’s ‘Homeless Hub’, which operates a 24-hour assessment centre aimed at helping ‘new’ rough sleepers off the streets (see the poster opposite, which is up across the city), the government has announced extra cash to roll out NSNO across the country.

Rough sleepers are brought into the Hub by outreach teams where they can spend up to three days while the NSNO finds them accommodation or ‘reconnects’ them to home areas.

But, rather than specifically replicating the London scheme, which saw over 270 people pass through the Hub in its first three months, the government said it wants local authorities to “adopt the principles” of No Second Night Out.

These principles involve providing a safe place to assess rough sleepers’ needs, access to emergency accommodation and healthcare. According to Homeless Link, which is managing the £20m fund, there is also an emphasis on reconnection, when rough sleepers originate from another area or country.

Hannah Cornford from the organisation explained that the money would come from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), over three years. This cash will go into a new Homeless Transition Fund, and from there be doled out to qualifying charities and projects.

“With homelessness rising and services facing funding cuts, it is crucial that we don’t just maintain essential frontline help,” Cornford said.

“While the Homelessness Transition Fund cannot be a substitute for local authority money, it will provide key frontline agencies with breathing space to secure their futures and to innovate - especially in communities that face an increase in rough sleeping.”

Another of the NSNO principles involves getting the public involved. In the London pilot, this has included the launch of a phone number encouraging people to report rough sleepers.

But Petra Salva, director of the NSNO in London, stressed that the phone line and the Hub were two completely separate entities. “The phone line is simply a tool to get some intelligence and to deploy a response,” she said. “People can use it for self referral or members of the public can call in if they’re concerned about someone.”

Once someone has contacted the phone line, details will be taken and an outreach team sent out. “It may result in someone coming to the Hub,” she said. “However, it may not, if for instance the rough sleeper is not ‘new’.”

A ‘new’ rough sleeper has not yet been recorded by outreach teams - though Salva admits this is an inexact science and these people are not necessarily all new to rough sleeping.

“Last year just under 4,000 people were contacted on the streets of London rough sleeping. Of those 60 per cent were recorded for the first time,” she said. And these are the people the NSNO is targeting.

According to the DCLG, by 6 July the NSNO scheme had already “helped prevent 135 people from spending a second night on the streets.”

But the Hub has struggled to follow up on how successful its placements actually are.

Ms Salva explained: “Of the 270 or so who have come through the assessment Hub, 68 per cent have moved directly from this facility away from the streets. Either they’ve gone into supported housing, they’ve gone into a bed and breakfast, they’ve gone back to their family home, they’ve gone back to their own home or they’ve been reconnected abroad. But I’ll be completely open and honest about this: we have not been as good at recording or following up on how sustainable the outcomes are.”

When the Hub opened, the NSNO intended to track people 24 and 48 hours after they left, she said, then at one month and three months - but in most cases that hasn’t happened. This, she said, is one area the NSNO is working on.

Announcing the extension of the scheme in July, Housing Minister Grant Shapps said the national roll out of the NSNO scheme showed that “the government would not let tough challenges get in the way of taking action to protect the most vulnerable in society.”

However, Shapps, who declined to comment, is also supporting plans to make it easier for social housing landlords to evict anti-social tenants. And since the riots that hit London and other big cities last month, he has also pledged his support to the eviction of those involved.

For some, it will be hard to reconcile his NSNO roll-out with plans to facilitate the eviction of those already on the bottom rungs of the housing ladder.

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