Background

Employment, Education and Skills (EES) services for homeless individuals should be part of a holistic approach which links up support in relation to housing, employment and training, physical and mental health, social networks/ families, substance misuse, and other related issues. Providing EES support in isolation of these things means that services, and individuals, are much less likely to succeed.¹

Off the Streets and into Work, through funding from the European Social Fund’s Equal Action 3 programme, have developed the Right Deal for Homeless People. The need for a tailored, holistic service delivery for homeless people has been on the Government’s agenda since at least 2004, when DWP’s Building on New Deal report recognised that there needs to be services for ‘people with acute and/or multiple barriers to work who now represent a larger proportion of those who do not work’. Additionally, the Office of the Third Sector’s Reaching Out: An Action Plan for Social Exclusion recognised that ‘Adults living chaotic lives are often in contact with multiple agencies, with each person costing statutory services tens of thousands of pounds every year. Individual agencies sometimes miss those who have multiple needs, and may fail to look holistically at the individual’. And, the recent Freud² review, looking at the future of welfare to work, referred to the fact that “Multiple disadvantage does not receive the attention it deserves because of the Government’s ‘client group’ approach. It needs more work to be understood fully”.

Objectives for the project

OSW has produced and will promote a new model of service delivery – ‘The Right Deal for Homeless People’ – which has drawn on the lessons learnt from our Equal pilots and other OSW programmes, identifying what services need to be delivered (and how) to address the multiple barriers that homeless people face trying to access sustainable employment, and identify how much they cost.

The project has:

• Gathered and examined existing research and data, including findings from the TMD London projects, to see what works, and what lessons have been learnt.
• Carried out additional research where required, looking into assessment tools, case management and positive outcomes for people with multiple disadvantage, including data analysis and review of soft outcomes measurement systems.
• Consulted with a key stakeholders network to inform and influence the model, including experts in the fields of job brokering, health, employment, finance, housing and benefits.
• Undertaken a cost benefit analysis.
• Researcedh and drafted a final costed plan detailing the new model of service delivery.
• Effectively liaised and communicated with partners and stakeholders at regional, national and European level.
• Gathered the views of homeless service users to inform the model.

What next?

The new model of service delivery for homeless people was launched at an event on 8th May 2008, including keynote speeches from David Freud, architect of DWP‘s welfare reform proposals, Fran Parry, Chair of the Employment Related Services Association, and Linda Butcher, OSW’s Chief Executive. This will now be followed up by an intensive dissemination programme in 2008, with an aim to influence key Government bodies to support a Right Deal pilot programme, which will enable us to test and evaluate our key recommendations to improve employability for homeless individuals.

At the Right Deal launch event, David Freud said:

“I particularly welcomed the emphasis on an individual approach that is in this report, because it seemed to me that if you’re tackling multiple disadvantages among people you must individualise, and it’s very difficult for general programmes to capture that ….. what is also interesting in here [the report] was the importance of the other categories, in particular health, skills, training and the housing component, so pulling all that in , in a coherent way, is a real issue for the state to get right.”

Download the Right Deal Report (2.7 Mb)

Construction photographs used in the report provided by kind permission of Tyneside Cyrenians.

For further information on the Right Deal, please contact Michael Fothergill, the project manager, on 020 7089 2732, or email at michaelfothergill@osw.org.uk.

Footnotes:
1 FEANTSA EWG paper ‘Multiple Barriers, Multiple Efforts: Employment Barriers and Solutions for homeless individuals', Linda Butcher, OSW, August 2006
2 Reducing Dependency, increasing opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work, An independent report to the Department for Work and Pensions, David Freud, January 2007