Evidence-led approaches to tackling rough sleeping in rural communities

Homelessness in rural England is on the rise, meaning too many people face the danger of having no place to call home. Despite the prevailing image of homelessness as occurring in cities, we know that homelessness can occur anywhere.

Findings from the working group suggested the following good current and emerging practices. Investing in a flexible, expansive model of outreach by:

• Building a network of community referrers in rural settings, to address limited outreach capacity in rural areas and build links with partners.
• Using technology such as geocoding systems to better identify need and expand reach into remote areas
• Reconsidering verification barriers to speed up support and take a ‘balance of probabilities’ approach.
• Promoting Streetlink and self-referral through awareness raising in rural settings.

Building better data to evidence need and leverage multi-agency support to tackle the problem by:

• More regular data collection, including at points of identification not just verification.
• Using location-based technologies to build a clearer spatial picture of need, such as geo-mapping.
• Capturing hidden forms of need in rural areas through bringing wider range of partners together over a longer period, building on the approach of the Women’s Rough Sleeping Census. 
• Evidencing need and cost savings to leverage support from local partners.

Effective governance to make rural homelessness a priority by:

• Rural-proofing each homelessness and rough sleeping strategy, proactively consulting rural stakeholders.
• Collaborating with health through data sharing and joint commissioning, to deliver integrated support om rural settings.
• Partnering with neighbouring authorities to address ‘flow’ into urban centres and to deliver services which may not be viable in their area alone.
• Raising awareness raising locally to combat stigma and limited awareness of support available in rural settings.

Homelessness in rural England is on the rise, meaning too many people face the danger of having no place to call home. Research by the Universities of Kent and Southampton, in partnership with the Rural Homelessness Count coalition found there has been a 24 per cent rise in levels of rough sleeping in rural areas in just one year between 2021 and 2022, while research from CPRE has shown that over the past five years statutory homelessness has risen 40 per cent in rural communities. 

Despite the prevailing image of homelessness as occurring in cities, we know that homelessness can occur anywhere. Sparsity, remoteness and other socio-geographical challenges may render homelessness in the countryside less visible, but that does not mean it is not there. 

Local authorities across England are working tirelessly to prevent and respond to homelessness, but there has often been a lack of attention on the specific needs and realities of homelessness prevention and relief in rural areas. Research by the Universities of Kent and Southampton, in partnership with the Rural Homelessness Count coalition, has found that rural areas face particular challenges. These include physical isolation, the absence of support services and limited transportation options. Insufficient funding in rural areas often pushes people to urban centres. The shame and stigma associated with homelessness in more affluent or rural areas can be a significant barrier to getting support. 

This is amongst the first pieces of work to look at local approaches to rural rough sleeping, and is one step of an ongoing effort by the Local Government Association and Rural Homelessness Counts coalition to map and pool effective practice and ideas across England. This work has looked specifically at rough sleeping, and recognises the important role that data and evidence can play in preventing and relieving rough sleeping in rural communities. 

This comes at the same time as new efforts to develop data-led approaches to rough sleeping, such as the partnership between the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Centre for Homelessness Impact, to develop a framework to measure progress towards the vision of ending rough sleeping. This guide can be utilised as part of efforts to adopt data-led approaches across the breadth of England, and ensure that no one has to sleep rough in any part of the country – including rural areas.

Rural homelessness is by far one of the worst things… Nobody knows you’re there, nobody cares you’re there, you are on your own.

Person experiencing homelessness in rural England 

The Rural Homelessness Counts coalition, co-ordinated by English Rural Housing Association,  the Local Government Association and the Centre for Homelessness Impact established a working group of local authority housing leads with the aims to identify emerging practice and develop new data-led solutions that can support local authorities to effectively respond to increasing rough sleeping in rural areas during housing shortages and an increasingly constrained fiscal context for local government.

Our working group members represented different tiers of local authority across district, county and unitary:

• Lincolnshire County Council
• Northumberland County Council
• Herefordshire Unitary Authority
• Mid Sussex District Council
• Stratford upon Avon District Council

We held three workshops with the working groups, asking key questions such as:

• How do local authorities currently collect data on rough sleeping?
• What are the barriers and opportunities for a more data-led approach to rural rough sleeping responses?
• In an ideal world, what might a new more data-led initiative to respond to rough sleeping in your local authority look like?
• What would need to be true to enable success for rural local authorities trying to be more data-led?

Workshops identified key areas for improving practice in rural communities. This included a combination of identifying existing effective practice in rural areas, ideas for overcoming barriers through innovation, and existing practice in urban areas that could be applied effectively to rural areas. This briefing sets out these proposals as considerations for improved practice in rural areas.

This is part of an ongoing effort to improve practice in rural areas. If you have examples or ideas, please contact [email protected]/[email protected].

The workshops identified three areas for an effective data-led approach:

• investing in a flexible, expansive model of outreach 
• building better data to evidence need and leverage multi-agency support to tackle the problem
• effective governance to make rural homelessness a priority.

Best practice:

• Building a network of community referrers: mapping groups and organisations in rural communities with intelligence around who might be experiencing or at risk of rough sleeping can help to increase referrals. This allows for outreach team with limited capacity to keep avenues open from more remote areas. For example, Herefordshire Council use outreach teams to cover rural areas and market towns through building links with partners such as food banks and NHS General Practices, to better identify people experiencing rough sleeping and referring them into support.
   
• Using technology to expand reach into remote areas: with limited capacity, rural and remote areas can get de-prioritised for outreach work. Technology can help to increase access to rural areas. Geocoding systems such as What3Words can help to more precisely identify rural locations without addresses, something promoted by St Mungo’s as well as Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. In Lincolnshire County Council, the street outreach service which ran across all district councils has previously used drones to identify people sleeping rough in remote and coastal locations. Deployment of such tools must be developed in an appropriate and sensitive way to mitigate the risks of overly invasive technology. 
   
• Re-considering verification barriers to speed up support: even when people sleeping rough are identified and referrals are made, the time it takes to reach the individual and verify them as rough sleeping can reduce the effectiveness of interventions. Durham County Council and Stratford-upon-Avon District Council outreach teams use a ‘balance of probability’ approach to verification, which allows people sleeping rough to be verified and access services in a more flexible way, opening swifter access to emergency accommodation, housing and support.
   
• Promoting Streetlink and self-referral in rural settings: StreetLink can be promoted as a vital tool for the public to support people sleeping rough, and awareness raising and rebranding can make it clear that the service covers rural areas not just urban ‘street’ environments. Somerset Council optimise its use of Streetlink by sharing information and how it can be accessed, what will happen after an alert is sent is sent and what subsequent support can be expected from outreach teams. This includes a target of verifying the individual as soon as possible, usually within 48 hours and providing feedback to Streetlink on the outcome of the alert within 14 days, sharing with the original referrer if requested.

Best practice:

• More regular data collection, including at points of identification not just verification: because of the barriers to verification that occur in rural areas, mapping levels of need can often be more effective when assessments are undertaken at the point of identification. Understanding trends, behaviours and barriers at the identification stage can help to improve service delivery and design and reduce timely verification barriers.
   
• Use location-based technologies to build a clearer spatial picture of need: the current model of data capture can make identifying location-based trends difficult, and does not capture individuals reporting rough sleeping but not picked up by outreach. Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) or ‘geo-mapping’ can help identify places where there are gaps and barriers to support, and tailor interventions in specific places to address this. This approach has been used with some success in certain urban contexts in the UK, such as Enfield Council, and in international settings such as California, with some promising results that can be applied in rural settings.
   
• Capturing hidden forms of need and identifying barriers to support: snapshot counts and statutory homelessness statistics fail to capture hidden forms of homelessness, such as sofa surfing and those in unsuitable accommodation. Taking the outreach model used by the Women’s Rough Sleeping Census, which was specifically designed to tackle, transient, intermittent and hidden rough sleeping, and applying it in a rural context can help to better identify rural rough sleeping. This model brings a wider range of partners together than just outreach over a longer period (one week compared to a night), increasing the likelihood of people sleeping in woods, sheds, or at bus or train stations being identified. This data can build more effective strategies, which draw from more accurate pictures of need, and incentivise devising preventative strategies which target resources further upstream. 
   
• Evidencing need and cost savings to leverage support from local partners: better data can help to bolster the case for why other local services and systems should partner and invest in housing and rough sleeping services. For example, Herefordshire Council previously undertook a cost benefit analysis that found working with people in accommodation rather than on the streets generate savings, with most of the savings accrued to the health system. This brought local NHS providers on board with initiatives to address rough sleeping in the area. More urban authorities such as Greater Manchester Combined Authority have pioneered these practices in state-of-the-art ways, establishing a Unit Cost Database to demonstrate a better understanding of public service transformation opportunities in terms of cost/benefit among public services nationally, including cost assumptions for rough sleeping. 
   
• Using per capita measures can also help to highlight how relative to the size of the area, rough sleeping can be a big problem in rural areas, something which absolute numbers can neglect. This can help to reduce risk of rural areas being dismissed as having low levels of need.

Best practice:

• Rural-proofing each homelessness and rough sleeping strategy: in areas which cover rural and urban environments, rural areas can sometimes be deprioritised in the design of strategies. It is important to consider how adaptation may be needed to respond to rough sleeping in more remote areas, including proactively consulting rural stakeholders, representative bodies, parish councils, faith groups and less conventional representatives such as farmers. It is also important to consider how the full spectrum of rural stakeholders can be incorporated onto homelessness and rough sleeping boards.
   
• Collaborating with health through data sharing and joint commissioning: Bringing a range of local services into governance boards and strategic decision making can help to incentivise the creation of effective practice. For example, New Forest District Council has embedded a Mental Health Nurse in the council’s Homelessness and Support Team, to provide whole person support when people face crisis, as well as having access to NHS data systems to inform housing decisions.This came in response to overstretched mental health teams being unable to adequately support people experiencing homelessness. This did not require additional resources but was delivered as a result of data-led collaborative commissioning. In 18 months, 62 cases were supported through the service, including nine people sleeping rough who took up accommodation and nine hospital admissions prevented (New Forest District Council, internal data). Tools such as Joint Strategic Needs Assessments can be undertaken to identify rough sleeping and health needs and design co-produced strategies and services such as this which address the multiple needs people face. 
   
• Partnering with neighbouring authorities: because of the ‘flow’ from rural to urban areas, developing partnerships to provide upstream interventions in rural settings should involve urban neighbours too. Rural areas should develop working arrangements to deliver services which may not be viable in their area alone.
   
• Education and awareness raising locally: stigma and limited awareness can act as a barrier in rural areas and limited possibilities of referrals. Delivering ‘homelessness 101’ sessions can address this, through working in communities to build understanding of the existence of the problem, risks and dangers, and need for housing-led solutions. For example, in Herefordshire County Council, the Talk Community network has been established to connect local residents to services, with homelessness and rough sleeping support integrated. In rural areas, an early intervention officer is available to assist with training community groups, providing knowledge and resources to increase awareness of the interventions available, identify issues emerging in the community and run rough sleeping drop-ins.

This guide outlines some emerging practice and new solutions for addressing rough sleeping in rural communities. This aims to address the issues associated with isolation, fragmented services, and lack of attention on the issue in many parts of the country.

This is the start of an ongoing piece of work to identify and scale up effective interventions. If you have examples or ideas, please contact [email protected]/[email protected].