By Emma Lindley, HQN associate

I’ll admit I went into reading the Plan to End Homelessness with fairly low expectations. I’d read some of the commentary about it first and expected to be unimpressed.

So, when the first section I read was a foreword from the lived experience group, placed right at the front, it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. And as I read on, it kept getting better. The evidence base is strong. There’s a clear recognition that prevention starts well before the 56-day point; presentation at a local authority is usually the end point, not the start of homelessness. The whole-system framing – health, care, justice, domestic abuse – reflects how this actually plays out in people’s lives.

Having expected a strategy of warm words, I was pleasantly surprised to find something much more ambitious. That ambition shows up in the fact it’s not just about improving homelessness services. It’s about the system behaving differently: intervening earlier, sharing responsibility, and reducing the number of moments where people fall through gaps at points of discharge or transition. So, there’s a very clear sense of direction, but how this will be delivered in practice is another matter.

Whilst the strategy takes a whole-system approach, most of the investment still sits with local authority homelessness services. In effect, we’re asking for system-wide change while largely funding the part of the system that already holds the statutory duty and is the most directly accountable when things go wrong.

The challenges with this approach seem fairly obvious. Housing teams are again being asked to convene, influence and drive change across health, justice and care, systems they don’t control and don’t fund. The strategy is clear about the direction of travel, but much less clear about how organisations facing very different pressures are meant to make that shift.

Indeed, we already have a practical example of this with the Duty to Refer. It’s been in place for several years, and compliance across the public sector remains mixed. Not because people don’t care, but because it hasn’t consistently cut through into everyday priorities, workflows and accountability.

So, when the conversation turns to new duties to collaborate, it feels reasonable to ask how these will land any differently. Take health, particularly acute trusts. Many are operating with significant deficits and constant pressure around waiting lists, staffing and immediate clinical risk. Even where there’s a clear understanding that homelessness is a health issue, investing upstream in prevention can feel like something that sits outside what organisations are being held to account for day to day.

Even when homelessness services are holding funding, shifting that investment into health settings isn’t straightforward. The skills and relationships to do this don’t always sit in the right place. Governance routes are complex. Commissioning and procurement rules don’t always line up. Trying to move money across traditional boundaries can quickly become far more difficult in practice than it looks on paper.

For me, this strategy feels less like a neat roadmap and more like a marker. It’s much clearer than previous strategies about what needs to happen. The question now isn’t whether we agree with the direction. Many of us already do. The question is whether systems with very real constraints can work out the how, without defaulting back to housing holding the risk when things get difficult.