The Government has published a new self-assessment toolkit to help councils and their partners review how effectively they prevent and respond to youth homelessness.
The toolkit covers young people aged 16 to 25 and is intended to be used jointly by local authority housing and children’s services and commissioners of housing-related support. It also calls for local partners, including voluntary and community sector organisations, to be involved in developing the assessment. The toolkit complements the new youth chapter of the Homelessness Code of Guidance, which we discussed in our previous blog.
The Youth Homelessness Collective was pleased to support the toolkit’s development by helping the Government convene discussions with young people with experience of homelessness, housing instability and care. We are grateful to the young people who contributed their experiences and views. The Government thanked the Collective for this work in the toolkit’s executive summary.
Young people highlighted the importance of early intervention through schools and other trusted services, being listened to and believed, and receiving support that is trauma-informed, person-centred and responsive to their circumstances.
What does the toolkit cover?
The toolkit looks across the youth homelessness pathway through four areas:
Universal prevention - focused on tackling the root causes of youth homelessness.
Targeted prevention - focused on people at greater risk of homelessness.
Improving emergency response - including suitable emergency accommodation.
Recovery and preventing repeat homelessness - including move-on and independent living.
Councils score individual criteria within these areas from 1 to 3. A score of one means practice is not meeting expectations, while a score of three means good practice is embedded, consistently delivered and improving outcomes. Areas requiring development should inform an action plan with named leads, timescales, measures of success and senior oversight.
What is positive?
We welcome the toolkit’s focus on prevention and partnership working across the services young people come into contact with. It recognises the contribution of education, health, youth justice, housing providers and voluntary and community sector organisations to preventing youth homelessness.
It also says local partners should be involved in developing the assessment and that service design and improvement plans should be co-produced with young people with lived experience of homelessness.
We are delighted to see several members of the Youth Homelessness Collective included in the toolkit’s good practice annex, including Centrepoint, Depaul UK, Homeless Link, Herts Young Homeless, Roundabout, SASH and St Basils. Their examples appear across Community, Skills and Advocacy, Early Identification of Homelessness Risks, Preventing Crisis and Targeted Support, Young People in Housing Crisis, and Commissioning, Resettlement and Successful Independent Living, reflecting the breadth of expertise across the Collective.
Where could the toolkit go further?
The toolkit applies broad scoring descriptions across a wide range of criteria. Clearer evidence requirements would help councils score their practice consistently and focus on whether services are working for young people, not simply whether they exist.
Additionally, the annex provides useful examples of good practice, but some could benefit from more practical detail.
Using the toolkit to hold councils to account
The toolkit could provide a clearer basis for holding councils to account. Its scoring framework and resulting action plans should make it easier to identify local shortcomings, assign responsibility for improvement and track whether agreed action is delivered.
However, the process relies on councils assessing their own performance. It is unclear whether completed assessments and action plans will be published or independently reviewed. Publishing assessments would allow young people and local organisations to compare councils’ scores with their experience of local services and track whether promised improvements are delivered.
The toolkit has the potential to strengthen both local services and accountability, particularly if councils involve young people and local partners as intended. Publishing assessments, action plans and local progress updates would help show whether councils are addressing the gaps they identify and delivering better outcomes for young people.
Written by Franki Taylor, Senior Policy and Research Officer at Centrepoint