National Youth Homelessness Scheme

Changing priorities

Increasingly authorities are finding it impossible to sustain previous practice in homeless acceptances and offers of accommodation, whether short term supported accommodation or permanent unsupported accommodation:

  • too many young people offered permanent housing are ill-equipped to sustain the tenancy;
  • accommodation-based support has limited availability and it may be uneconomic to provide services tailored to the needs of individual young people;
  • the experience of homelessness can be damaging, adding to the difficulties of vulnerable young people in eventually establishing a viable unsupported lifestyle.

Authorities are introducing more effective prevention measures, including work with younger age-groups and with whole families. They are also becoming more focused on delivering "pathways of care and support", leading in stages to independent living, some of them with quite formal requirements of young people to move from one stage to the next.

Typically, youth homelessness strategies are focusing on:

  • prevention of homelessness,
  • non-accommodation-based services,
  • intensive support for vulnerable young people,
  • work with young people's immediate and extended families,
  • planned move-on into both social and private-sector accommodation.

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