There is less than a year to go until the next general election. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to say to both the current and any future government: get real about homelessness.  

Currently, homelessness charities like Oasis Community Housing are effectively being forced to subsidise local governments who are shockingly under-funded and under resourced. According to Homeless Link, between 2010 and 2018 the amount of money that local authorities received for work with the homeless, dropped by a massive £1 billion.  

In that same period, most homelessness services – including ours – have not received inflationary increases for many parts of their work. So we’re being squeezed in every direction: the total funding available is being cut, contracts aren’t keeping up with inflation, and the need is growing. We’re effectively being asked to do the same amount (or more) for less money.  

I have every sympathy for local councils’ who are in impossible positions, they have been forced to rely on homelessness charities to stand in the gap and provide the services that should be the responsibility of government, whether it be local or national, this can’t continue. 

Caring for those experiencing and facing homelessness is not a nice-to-have extra in society: it is a vital building block of welfare. How we do this says a lot about who we are as a nation, and currently, we should be ashamed. 

Charities such as Oasis Community Housing are often treated as if we are commercial operations with considerable surpluses, and room to manoeuvre when it comes to subsiding homeless provision. We aren’t and we don’t, and that’s why we need the government to increase their funding to tackle homelessness. 

Around the country, homelessness charities are at a tipping point. They can no longer underwrite provision of care for the most vulnerable in society. And, you could argue, they should not be required to do so. Charities are essential for bringing hope to the most vulnerable people in society, seeing the worth in the people they support and working with them to rebuild their confidence. 

Therefore, my message to whoever is in government is this: take homelessness seriously. Provide for it fully through adequately supporting local authorities. Do not expect charities to do this job on our own. Homelessness charities are already being forced to cut back their work, and the cost of this – let alone the moral jeopardy – will come back out of the national purse as more and more people fall through the net into homelessness and personal crisis.  

We know that it’s far more cost-effective to help people find housing, to help them begin to tackle their trauma, than to see them become homeless. 

I recently signed a letter by Homeless Link, along with 36 other homelessness organisations, to Jeremy Hunt expressing the need to release more funding in the spring budget to help homelessness services stay afloat. The letter outlined that out of 120 homeless link providers 36% have already reduced their services to meet financial pressures, while 41% risk service closures imminently. 

Charities like Oasis Community Housing are the canary in the coal mine. Government needs to wake up and pay attention to them.  

David Smith, CEO Oasis Community Housing

How are you feeling this month? January is reputedly the month in which many of us struggle. Over-spending at Christmas, the wait for a pay cheque as it’s a longer month, and the dark evenings, can all add up to a feeling of gloom.

That’s now embodied in Blue Monday – which this year fell on January 15 – which is said to be the most depressing day of the year. It’s calculated on factors including the weather, finances and perhaps the failure of new year’s resolutions, as well as the distance from pay day.

Of course, we should add into this the cost-of-living crisis and the fact that already worrying fuel bills are set to rise by five per cent this month.

This can make January a difficult time for those of us who are fortunate enough to have health, shelter and food. But imagine if you don’t have those things. January is a particularly bleak time to be homeless.

You have all been exceptionally generous in the run-up to Christmas, helping to raise more than £120,000 in our Giving a Home Christmas appeal, enabling people to have a place to call home, and I want to thank you for that. Every pound given to that appeal really does help and alter lives for good.

We are all acutely aware that homelessness is a growing issue. There are fewer rental properties. The rent of those available is rising. The amount of social housing has decreased. And people are seeking a safe haven in the UK from wars and climate change. The outcome of all of these factors is that some 309,000 people in England still don’t have somewhere to call home.

Homelessness isn’t something that happens to other people. It’s something that could happen to any of us. I was struck by this recently, seeing a television report about a mother-of-four who worked full time, but whose rented house was being sold. Rents had risen in her town, and there simply wasn’t anywhere that she could afford to rent. She wept as she told the reporter, ‘I feel that I’m letting my children down’.

We exist to help people like this mother, who find themselves in need of somewhere to call home. However blue this January feels to us, it must feel so much harder to people facing or already experiencing homelessness.

But, we can and are making a difference. You are helping us to do that. So, as a new year’s resolution, let’s keep going. Your gifts, time and prayers all help to change people’s circumstances and to bring a light in the darkness. Thank you.

David Smith, CEO, Oasis Communtiy Housing

What does Christmas mean to you? Is it, as the adverts suggest, a time of candlelight and beautifully-cooked meals among loved ones? Or is it a time of tension, struggles, and perhaps loneliness? Having seen Christmas cards and decorations in the shops for three months, by the time that the big day arrives, you may simply be fed up of the whole thing.

However we feel about it, Christmas is in fact the time of most incredible hope, and it’s a particularly hopeful message for the 271,000 families in the UK facing homelessness and the 2,447 people who are sleeping rough.

This is because, in his birth, and in the early years of his life, Christ utterly identifies with the homeless. We have sanitised the idea of a child in a manger, but this is a profound statement of love and identification. The Son of God is born far from his family’s home, under armed occupation, without a roof over his head. His first night on this earth is spent among the animals stabled at an inn at a frantically-busy census season.

This is followed by threat to life. Herod’s troops are on the look out for him – a threat to the established rule – and warned in a dream, his father Joseph moves the whole family to neighbouring Egypt. They become, if you like, early asylum seekers, simply to keep Jesus alive.

God not only cares about the families who are experiencing or facing homelessness in the UK right now, as the cost-of-living crisis mounts, he’s lived it.

As we stop at the end of what may have been a busy, or tiring, year, this is a profound idea to reflect on. God knows. God cares. God has lived it.

This is at the heart of all our work among those living with homelessness. It is the driving force behind wanting to see change in this country, with a system of trauma-informed care becoming nationwide, so that everyone has the chance of recovering from homelessness and never returning to it.

We wish you a very Happy Christmas, and the knowledge that, whatever you are experiencing, God is with you in it.

David Smith, CEO Oasis Community Housing

Sometimes you feel the winds of change blowing in politics. Sitting in a crowded room in a hotel in Liverpool during the Labour Party Conference was just one of those moments. MPs, journalists, activists, charity workers, those who had experienced homelessness, all came together to talk about the need for trauma-informed support for all those experiencing homelessness.

What does that mean? It would mean that everyone working alongside those who are facing homelessness would be trained to understand people’s traumas. That means that small things that can act as triggers for people can be avoided, the trauma of homelessness reduced.

This meeting was not the beginning of a journey. We have been journeying with people and with this aim for some time. But it’s an exciting stop on the route. There was standing room only as this subject was discussed. I was delighted by the energy in the room, the commitment to seeing change come about.

You have been part of that journey and you still are. As we step very definitely into autumn and head for Christmas, we think more and more of those who live with homelessness. As with trauma-informed support, small things can make a difference. So we are delighted to have launched our Giving a Home appeal again this winter. It has made a huge difference to people’s lives in the past and we know it will again this year.

Just £6.20 enables someone to use public transport to get to one of our drop-in centres. £15.11 could help them receive help at a drop-in centre. It’s remarkable what a difference your donations can and do make every single day.

The cost-of-living crisis faces us all, but if you are able to give just a little, we know that it will go a very long way. In donating you’ll be journeying with people that you may never meet, enabling them to take the next steps on the road to a different future.

We’ll continue to travel with politicians, activists, charity workers and all those who want to bring change to people’s lives. Together, we can make a difference.

David Smith, CEO Oasis Community Housing.

Recently, we joined forces with 31 other homeless charities in writing to the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, calling on him to take urgent steps to end rough sleeping.

A year ago, Mr Sunak said that he was ‘committed to ending rough sleeping once and for all by 2024’. Yet, since then, it’s obvious that more people are ending up in a rough sleeping situation, rather than less.

The Annual Rough Sleepers Snapshot, conducted in late 2022, showed that rough sleeping rose by 26 per cent between 2021 and 2022, the biggest annual rise since 2015. Meanwhile, in London, figures show that there has been a rise in rough sleeping in every quarter between 2022-2023 compared with the year before.

So, what does that mean and why should we care? Many organisations that work with those facing homelessness haven’t seen an inflationary rise in their income for years. That means that, year-on-year, they are absorbing these rises, and that, put simply is unsustainable. It makes it harder and harder to provide the trauma-informed care that we know helps people move on from homelessness.

That means there is a lot of jeopardy for those who find themselves at a particularly vulnerable point in life. At Oasis Community Housing, cost-of-living pressures have added tens of thousands of pounds to our costs. That places some of our services at risk, services at which people facing homelessness depend on.

This has felt like a year of strikes, as doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, rail workers, security staff at Heathrow, teachers, passport office staff, civil servants and university staff have all raised their voices about cost-of-living pressures.

Homelessness organisations aren’t immune from the cost-of-living pressures either and so our message to Rishi Sunak is clear. We are calling on him to live up to his commitment to end rough sleeping, and in doing so, to offer a lifeline to those who are most at need in our society. To do so, he will need to provide Local Authorities and other commissioners of homelessness services with additional funding so that they can overcome inflationary pressures. This is both the moral and the cost-effective choice when it comes to addressing homelessness.

Making the necessary changes to help those facing homelessness is an act of the will, a political choice. Now, we need to see the commitment from the government to make this happen.

David Smith, CEO Oasis Community Housing

Tackling homelessness isn’t simply about housing people. It’s about recognising that each person is an individual with hopes, dreams and yes, potentially traumas too. We know that 94 per cent of those facing homelessness have experienced trauma.

Coming to terms with that trauma, understanding it, and moving forward can be a messy, difficult and expensive process. But it is the way to ensure that for each individual homelessness is rare, brief and doesn’t re-occur.

It can be done, but it requires money and policy change. Local authorities have less money to spend on homelessness now than they did in 2010. Add to that a decline in building social housing, and you can see that there is a squeeze.

Currently, nearly £25 billion is being spent on housing benefit. That’s largely because people experiencing homelessness are housed by private landlords. Is this money well spent? I’d argue not. Imagine a scenario where you have 30-40 people who’ve come from traumatic situations all under one roof in rented accommodation. This is not a great environment for anyone, but especially those made vulnerable by traumatic experiences.

Getting the right provision for each person is so very important. This morning, I was reminded of the reality of working with and helping people who’ve experienced multiple traumas. A young woman, who we are helping, tried to end her life. She needs specialist medical and mental health care, but it simply isn’t available. We’ll ensure that staff are on watch every two hours, day and night. But, wouldn’t it be better if the right, expert provision was made for her?

When it is, things go well. Mobarak fled Sudan when he was just 14. It’s bewildering to think of what that experience must have been like for a teenager. The final leg of his journey was in a small boat across the Channel, an experience that he describes as ‘scary’. He thought he might die at any moment.

He’s received trauma-informed support and is now feeling far more ‘confident’ about the future. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?

Within the next year to 18 months there will be a general election. For whoever forms the next government, the issue of tackling homelessness will need to be on their agenda. So what to do? We need to build tens of thousands of social homes per year just to catch up with lost provision. So let’s look at that £25 billion that we pay private landlords. Could we spend it better elsewhere? Could we start with the support and help that people need?

Investment will be required. But it is an investment in people, not just bricks and mortar. Furthermore, it’s an investment in our society, so that it becomes one where, if you have the misfortune to become homeless, that is a brief and rare experience, and only happens to you once. Investment in people like this means that the revolving door of homelessness is replaced by a door that closes behind someone as they enter their future lives, able to step forward into their hopes and dreams.

David Smith, CEO of Oasis Communtiy Housing

David Smith, CEO of Oasis Community Housing, shares what he would like to see the next government do about homelessness.

First, let me give you some good news. Homelessness does not have to be as it is currently. We are used, sadly, to seeing people facing homeless on our streets, and to hearing about the increasing numbers (currently 250,000 people) who are in temporary housing – most of whom are families.

It’s easy to become so used to the situation that we think it can never change. But it can and it must. Homelessness should be rare, brief and not reoccur. Together, we can certainly achieve that.

Within the next two years, we’ll have a new government, and whichever party is in office, tackling homelessness needs to be one of their highest priorities.

Parties of all stripes are going to want to see a rise in GDP, a recovery from the current slump. That requires everyone to be able to reach their potential. That can’t happen if homelessness and trauma mean that you are in a sleeping bag under a bush on a roundabout.

A recent report that we commissioned from Northumbria University found that some 94 per cent of people facing homelessness have suffered trauma. It is trauma that leads to their homeless situation, and homelessness is itself traumatic. Yet, less than half of the people we surveyed had received the specialist help they needed to tackle that trauma.

If we can tackle the trauma, we can stop the cycle of homelessness, where people find themselves back on the streets or in temporary accommodation. Without doing this, the underlying causes of a person’s homelessness are never dealt with and the cycle continues.

We should care about people facing homeless for altruistic reasons and for selfish ones. Altruistically, people have inherent worth. We are all our brother’s keepers. We care for people because what is happening to them could be happening to us.

Economically, the implications of homelessness to the country are vast: one study of the homeless population of roughly 2,000 people in Newcastle and Gateshead found it cost public services a collective £132 million just to support this group for one year. Not to mention the lost economic contribution each of these people could be making that would benefit both them and our economy.

We have both financial and moral reasons to tackle homelessness. It is, quite simply, the right thing to do.

So, what do we want to happen?  Let’s look at the big picture first. We need to improve the welfare system, to prevent people slipping into crisis in the first place, to provide proper funding support for people when they’re in crisis, and to seriously up our game on social housing building by doubling it to enable them to move out of a crisis situation.

The housing crisis and homelessness are on a continuum. As you look at each part of that continuum, both the causes and the solutions are connected.

It is a major crisis for our country. We should be ashamed of that, in the sixth largest national economy in the world. The focus on short-termism has, arguably, helped keep this crisis from being resolved.

The next government must tackle this crisis. Even before the pandemic, homelessness was through the roof, with some 300,000 people facing homelessness: 4,500 of them sleeping rough, a situation that has seen a 141 per cent increase since 2010.

But homelessness is also a very personal issue. These are all individuals with hopes and dreams, just like us. We need to understand what happened to them and to help them to face and ultimately overcome the traumas that they have experienced.

How do we do this? The next government must establish minimum standards for the delivery of trauma-informed homelessness support services. It needs to develop and roll out a national trauma-informed training programme for frontline homeless support staff.

It should ensure that local authorities only commissioned services that that are trauma-informed, psychologically-informed and person-centred, remembering that this is about people, not an issue.

And finally, it will need to develop dedicated mental health pathways for people experiencing homelessness that acknowledge and reflect the challenges posed by the chaos of homelessness and its impact on trauma.That is a long game, but if tackled nationally and locally, could mean that whenever someone becomes homeless, it isn’t for long and doesn’t reoccur. And that would give us a greater chance of breaking down barriers to opportunity and increasing our national growth. In amongst that we could also do a powerful thing, changing individual lives for the better. That surely is a vote winner.

David Smith is CEO of Oasis Community Housing which works in the North East of England, London and Peterborough.