Better Monitoring Of Homelessness Prevention Needed

Better monitoring is needed to measure how effective homelessness prevention services are, Shelter Scotland has said. Shelter’s report has recommended that more efficient monitoring and evaluation is needed as there is little to help councils in measuring how successful their prevention programmes have been in providing lasting solutions.

Preventing homelessness is key to meeting the 2012 homelessness target – where every unintentionally homeless person will be entitled to a home – and to help people avoid facing the misery and distress that homelessness causes.

More effective monitoring of prevention services can make sure that councils are protected from being accused of gatekeeping – the process of diverting people from making homelessness applications.

Archie Stoddart, director of Shelter Scotland, said: “Scotland is internationally recognised as having the most forward thinking homelessness legislation – achieving the 2012 target is about improving the rights that homeless households have and the services that they can access. One of the essential parts of this is to increase the services that prevent households from becoming homeless in the first place.

“There are many factors which can contribute to preventing homelessness such as housing and homelessness advice and support services that are already available in Scotland. But we have to be able to show what works best, and for this there needs to be more effective ways of monitoring prevention work.”