Just over one month old, the Crisis and Resilience Fund has been supporting people across England with financial support to afford the basics: food, energy and housing costs. But what does it mean for people at risk of homelessness? Rhiannon Sims, Research Associate at I-SPHERE, takes an in-depth look at the role discretionary funds have played over the last decade in preventing homelessness. Taking interviews with the managers of Discretionary Housing Payment schemes and local authority responses to the Crisis Homelessness Monitor survey over a ten-year period, she answers the question: are discretionary schemes really the best way to support people with their housing costs and prevent homelessness? While the Crisis and Resilience Fund may offer more stability to local authorities through multi-year funding, it does nothing to address the gaps in housing benefit that low-income households face. Why? Because DHPs were never meant to fully protect households from cuts and freezes to housing benefit. The surest way to help low-income households avoid homelessness is to restore an adequate social security safety that reliably covers people’s rent. Policies like the removal of the benefit cap and the relinking of LHA rates to actual rents are clear and effective means to reduce homelessness risk at the population level and address child poverty – explicit aims of the UK Labour Government. Until then, funds like the Crisis and Resilience Fund are, as one local authority respondent put it, “a sticking plaster over a bullet hole [and] will not resolve the problem”.

Read her comment piece in Inside Housing here: https://lnkd.in/dXQdsXRA Read the full briefing by Rhiannon Sims and Beth Watts-Cobbe produced as part of the Safety Nets: Social Security in a Devolved UK project, here: https://lnkd.in/dqVieBgj