On 23^rd March 2020, five years ago almost to the day, I spent the day in a night shelter in south London. It was one of the most stressful days of my life, though not, as I recall, the most stress-filled day of that week. Housing Justice supported night shelter projects in London to access single-room accommodation provided by the Mayor of London, as public health evidence suggested people sleeping in communal night shelters were at serious risk from the respiratory virus COVID-19. 

In the adrenaline of the heat of the afternoon sun, I remember a member of the night shelter team turning to me and saying, “This is incredible; the government is nationalising rough sleeping.” The nationalisation of rough sleeping, known as the Everyone In scheme, led to a record fall in the number of people sleeping rough. 

Using vacant hotels captured the public imagination and, under the leadership of Louise Casey and the late Jeremy Swain, the impossible seemed to have become – amid a crisis – possible. In the weeks that followed that day in south London, the Housing Justice team supported dozens of night shelters, and around 700 people moved into single-room accommodations. Within a week, Lousie Casey had written to every local authority in England, directing them to bring rough sleepers inside. I lost count of the number of local authority people who referenced that letter (positively) and the directive tone over the following few months. 

But despite the hard work and high hopes, the sugar rush of Everyone In has given way to the slump of the mid-2020s, where rough sleeping has returned to the pre-pandemic levels and other forms of homelessness have soared.

Like so much of what happened during the pandemic, our initial expectations and learning have yielded to a more measured analysis. Five years on, these are the three lessons I have drawn from that time and the subsequent return of rough sleeping.

The power of slogans 

As a piece of communications and directive policy, Everyone In was uniquely successful. It captured the public imagination and was a welcome (and rare) good news story. It also suited the marketing campaigns of various charities to get behind the message. But this ended up being such a brilliant marketing exercise that too many people bought it. Almost all homelessness charities saw a drop in public donations after the pandemic, as many people thought that rough sleeping had, in effect, been solved. Similarly, local authorities drank the Kool-Aid, with some close to declaring an end to rough sleeping. I also passionately believed that we were close to ending rough sleeping. In hindsight, this seems like wishful thinking at best. 

James Carville once famously said that he would like to be reincarnated as the US Bond Market, such was the power to influence government policy. While it might not stretch to the influence of the bond market, the pandemic illustrates the huge power of homeless charities to set the terms of the public debate on homelessness and rough sleeping  The experience of most people of rough sleeping is not through engagement with people experiencing rough sleeping, but through literature that falls out of a newspaper, a promotional pop up on a website, or a two-minute film on television news. It is the dominant force on the public perceptions of homelessness. 

A clear message, simply communicated, grabbed the public attention and galvanised local agencies to work together.

Building back worse

Looking back on 2020 and the subsequent two years, I feel mildly embarrassed that I thought and publicly stated several times that we were close to ending rough sleeping, even though we had not addressed any of the structural reasons that rough sleeping exists. In April 2020, Housing Justice funded a range of move-ons for people who had been in Everybody In accommodation from night shelters; I expected the move-on to be tough, but in my ten years in this sector, it was one of the best years for moving on. This was largely because of the collapse of the private rental market in London as people moved out of the city, which meant the LHA was temporarily above market rents for a period in 2020. You can chart a strong correlation between the bounce-back effect of private rents in London and rising rates of rough sleeping over the subsequent five years. This, coupled with systemic issues in the immigration and asylum system and the effects of other policy failures in housing delivery, criminal justice, the NHS and particularly mental health, drug and alcohol support, alongside economic stagflation, are the systemic drivers of rough sleeping.

Neighbourhoods, not nationalisation

Most controversial of all, the experience of the pandemic teaches us the limits of nationalisation, or perhaps centralisation, of homelessness policy. 

The simple, clear instruction from Lousie Casey provided a rallying cry of a national shared endeavour. However, Everyone In was, in reality, a local endeavour. Within days, it was clear that there were tensions in local systems with close to 40,000 people entering local authority emergency accommodation during the pandemic. 

While the focus was on the big, powerful centre-making decrees, the reality on the ground was that small-scale, local partnerships involving the outreach team, local council and community groups, and charities involved in supporting people out of homelessness are what made the longer-term difference. For the first time, local authorities had to work with local non-commissioned agencies, even those they had long had difficult relationships with. Soup runs and food distribution charities were enlisted to support with feeding people in hotels, and non-commissioned night shelters, forced to decant their guests into single-room hotels, began new partnerships redeploying volunteers to support hotels, and eventually re-designing their services altogether. 

It was only in the aftermath of the immediate crisis, as the marketing myth of an end to rough sleeping took hold, that these partnerships began to fray. 

Marketing, manifest

If one example crystallises these lessons, consider for a moment the capital programme MHCLG ran to develop new, smaller, higher-quality night shelters in England in the five years since the pandemic. One of the key reasons funded projects faced huge difficulties was not the planning system or even funding, but community opposition to bringing vacant buildings back into use as accommodation for people who had experienced homelessness. A community objection to one project said, “Whose community is it for? We do not have rough sleeping here”. The same area saw one of the largest rises in rough sleeping in the official street count by the government.

I could not help but conclude on hearing this that the national debate we have on homelessness and rough sleeping has the unintended outcome of infantilising communities. If you constantly see marketing that talks of large expert organisations delivering clinical-like services to people with complex needs and asks simply for a transactional (£10 a month / sign a petition) response, many communities conclude there is no role for them in addressing local needs. This is wrong and counterproductive.

The future 

Five years on, the new government will soon publish their own Homelessness Strategy, shortly before the most challenging Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in a decade. 

That strategy will almost certainly move to a more preventative focus and will presumably progress the manifesto commitment to move towards a “cross-departmental approach” to homelessness. 

The CSR will present a difficult spending settlement with tough choices to be made on both the structural drivers of homelessness and rough sleeping and the practical mitigation of it. 

The lessons of the last five years and the economic realities of the next five should mean the government places communities at the heart of their plans. Pushing power and resources down to communities and to people living the realities of homelessness should be the priority. 

As homelessness and rough sleeping have grown worse over the last two decades, a growing centre has grown up around it. It seeks to tell communities how to respond to homelessness, using terms such as “innovation”, “pilot areas”, and “scale-up”. But try telling a night shelter with 12 people without recourse to public funds in a deprived neighbourhood that we need them to “innovate” or “scale up”. 

This centralisation is why large charities dominate the space (the largest rough sleeping charity in England has the turnover of a small Premier League football club), with a mindset that big is better. But it ignores the basic truth, that often the most successful services are small, place-based, and that the most sustainable route out of homelessness is building up a support network alongside employment.  You cannot commission community; you build it over time, so enabling local people alongside local authorities to develop truly community-led responses to homelessness should be at the heart of efforts to reduce homelessness and rough sleeping in the next five years. 

Look at what is happening elsewhere in government, in fact elsewhere in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government: the government is moving steadily towards more community-led approaches on a range of policy areas.  

The government published the Plan for Neighbourhoods in early March 2025, a first step towards a more genuinely grassroots approach to community development. But look too at what else the government is doing in almost every part of their work, the shift towards community-based services in the NHS under the Neighbourhood Health Service, the resurrection of Sure Start style Family Hubs or the importance of Neighbourhood Policing to the manifesto commitments on crime from the government. A Neighbourhood Homelessness Plan should work to galvanise local responses and rekindle the sense of shared endeavour of the pandemic. 

It is tempting to search for easy answers on homelessness, but there are not any, the pandemic teaches us that. What will be the outcome of a cross-departmental approach to homelessness and rough sleeping if we cannot join up services, charities and communities at a local level? 

A new homelessness strategy must walk the hard yards of adequate resources and meaningful structural reforms while empowering communities to support people locally out of homelessness. To paraphrase James Carville again, it is the community, stupid.