Tomorrow, Curiaโs Levelling Up commission is holding its third inquiry session based on housing and homelessness. Chaired by the former Shadow Minister for Social Care and Mental Health and Former Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, Paula Sherriff, the Housing and Homelessness Inquiry will take place over a two-hour sitting. The panels will be divided across three sessions.
Alongside the collation and analysis of relevant data, case study submissions, and regional sprints, four inquiry sessions will be held, spanning the four themes of the report. These sessions will bring together leaders from local, regional and national government, together with service providers, service users and more to discuss the issues at hand, but more importantly, the solutions.
Session 3 โ Homelessness and Rough Sleeping โ Addressing Challenges
The final panel will look to discuss the current state of homelessness and rough sleeping in the UK and particularly look at the devolved efforts in place to address this. Taking place and council-based examples, the session will discuss existing strategies in place to address homelessness, particularly scalable and adaptable best practices in the pre and post Covid-19 world and support structures provided by local authorities, charities and care homes to end homelessness.
Keeping with the theme of the Commission, the session will involve other areas of levelling up, discussing how such infrastructural provision and secure housing also promises employment opportunities and education and restate the importance of ending homelessness through its effects on other areas over an individualโs lifetime.
Panellists include Hugo Sugg, Chief Executive Officer, Cardon Banfield Foundation and Joe Garrod, Corporate Director of Housing, London Borough of Waltham Forest.
The Housing and Homelessness Inquiry
The sessions will begin with 3-5 minute speeches from members of the panel before the session is opened to questions and/or evidence submissions from attendees. Questions will be pre-submitted by attendees when they register for the session and will be moderated and shared with the panel in advance. The two sessions will last one hour each. These sessions are not intended to be exhaustive and will not be the extent of the Commissionโs work in this area. The Commission will be conducting ongoing data analysis and regional sprints in 2023 to further our evidential basis in this area.
Invites to this session will be issued to land development federations, housing regulatory bodies, manufacturing organisations, third sector organisations working in social housing and housing reform, relevant civil society bodies as well as local, regional and national government.
A key focus of the session will be the ways in which participants feel that national government can best facilitate, and create amenable conditions for, the scaling-up of best practice on issues surrounding housing and bridging gaps widened, especially during and post pandemic. A further concern will be the appraisal of cross-departmental policy at the national level via engagement with devolved public bodies, housing federations other relevant organisations.
Findings from this session on Housing and Homelessness, in conjunction with ongoing case study submissions, regional sprints, and quantitative data analysis, form the evidential basis for one of the four chapters of the final report, to be published in February 2024. We intend for these sessions not to simply re-state the problem, but to drive the discussion of solutions and examples of best practice.
The research does not attempt to restate the problem, but instead to provide solutions, and to consider what is needed to turn the admirable policy ambition of reducing health inequalities, into practice on the frontline.
The Levelling Up Commission
The Levelling Up Commission is considering how the valuable aims of the levelling up agenda can be achieved from the perspective of local and regional government, as well as service providers across all four areas of public policy detailed below. All too often, levelling up is being done โto and forโ communities, rather than in partnership. The Commission intends to ensure this is led locally.
To engage with each issue in-depth, a conceptual understanding of the framework at hand is warranted. As such, the Commission defines levelling up as:
โThe process of extending opportunities, improving wellbeing and reducing inequalities to empower citizens across the UK, through reducing disparity in resources and access to services. It involves concerted effort to bridge the gap between different regions and communities, with the ultimate goal of creating a more equitable and prosperous society.โ
In particular, the Commission will consider how improved public service and infrastructural provisions can help to drive down regional inequalities across England. Through a series of inquiry sessions, written submissions, regional sprints and quantitative data analysis, the Commission will set out a series of recommendations, and an accompanying implementation plan to consider how regional inequalities can be reduced from the perspective of public service design and provision in four key areas:
- Health and social care
- Education, skills and training
- Housing and homelessness
- Criminal justice and rehabilitation
The Commissioners of the Levelling Up Commission include:
- Hilary Spencer (Chief Executive of the Ambition Institute and former Director of the Government Equalities Office)
- Jeffrey Matsu (Chief Economist at CIPFA)
- Neil Carmichael (Former Chair of the Education Select Committee)
- Janet Budd (Chief Executive of the NHS Transformation Unit, NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit)
- George Coxon (Director and Owner of Classic Care Homes)
- Lara Newman (Chief Executive of LocatED)
- Anita Dockley (Research Director at the Howard League for Penal Reform)
- Lord Denis Stevenson (Crossbench per and founder of MQ: Transforming Mental Health)
Sign up to join the inquiry session here:
Watch our most recent inquiry session on education skills and training here: