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Voluntary sector leaders must fight homelessness together 2

Governance | Tania Mason | 9 Nov 2010

Tania Mason warns the achievements in tackling homelessness in the 80s could unravel if the charity sector does not rally together.

Senior voluntary sector figures who worked on the frontline to influence government policy on homelessness in the 1980s speak with pride about the successes they had and with respect about their opposite numbers in government who implemented the policies that they campaigned for.

Gerald Oppenheim, for instance, who until recently was head of policy at BIG, recalls how even when the Greater London Council (where he was a grants officer) was locked in battle with the government over its abolition, both sides put aside their differences to implement new measures to get people off the streets. The government gave the GLC powers to make grants to organisations like Shelter and Centrepoint, and Oppenheim says this programme was one of the only things the two sides were able to talk to each other about without taking positions.

“They were stirring times,” he recalls. “That was real partnership working.”

Julia Unwin, now CEO of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has similar memories of her tenure as director of Homeless Link from 1986 to1992, when she led a campaign to badger the government to tackle the growing problem of street homelessness in London.

Out of this came the Rough Sleepers Initiative: new funding that went directly to voluntary groups, the opening of new hostels, and the expansion of private sector leasing.

When I interviewed Julia after she won the Outstanding Leadership Award at this year’s Charity Awards she told me that the achievements of Homeless Link and other groups were not short-lived, that getting people off the streets remains a central government policy to this day.

Unfortunately, this may not be the case for much longer. Navca chief executive Kevin Curley used his closing speech at the Navca conference this week to warn that: “The government in recent times has made it more likely that people will become homeless.”

The lethal cocktail of public spending cuts, new caps on housing benefits and the un-ring-fencing of grants for the provision of local housing advice will put thousands more people at risk of homelessness, Curley said.

He advised local support groups to “put this issue in your in-tray”.

It’s a salutary warning and Curley is right to highlight the issue. A big increase in levels of homelessness would reverberate throughout the entire sector. As Curley said: “How can a local voluntary organisation provide training to a young person with a drug problem, if he is moving from bedsit to shared room, sleeping on the floors of friends? How can a local organisation do effective rehabilitation work with an offender in his late 20s – fresh out of prison – if he is threatened with homelessness?”

Two decades ago, a significant pool of our sector’s brightest talent mustered their energies and skills and applied effective pressure to the powers-that-be to tackle the very problem that now threatens to blight society again. The good work that was done then and has endured pretty well to this day must not be allowed to unravel. Maybe a co-ordinated effort by the sector’s next wave of outstanding leaders is required to stop the scourge of widespread homelessness seeping back in.

Tania Mason is group editor at Civil Society Media

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