Right Deal for Homeless People
Background
"Employment, Education and Skills (EES) services for homeless individuals should be part of a holistic approach which links up support in relation to housing, employment and training, physical and mental health, social networks/ families, substance misuse, and other related issues. Providing EES support in isolation of these things means that services, and individuals, are much less likely to succeed."1
The Right Deal for Homeless People was developed in 2008 by Off the Streets and into Work (OSW), through funding from the European Social Fund's Equal Action 3 programme. OSW merged with Crisis in April 2010 and the Right Deal has now become part of Crisis' policy programme.
The need for a tailored, holistic service delivery for homeless people has been on the Government's agenda since at least 2004, when DWP's Building on New Deal report recognised that there needs to be services for ‘people with acute and/or multiple barriers to work who now represent a larger proportion of those who do not work'.
Additionally, the Office of the Third Sector's Reaching Out: An Action Plan for Social Exclusion recognised that ‘Adults living chaotic lives are often in contact with multiple agencies, with each person costing statutory services tens of thousands of pounds every year. Individual agencies sometimes miss those who have multiple needs, and may fail to look holistically at the individual'. And, the recent Freud2 review, looking at the future of welfare to work, referred to the fact that "Multiple disadvantage does not receive the attention it deserves because of the Government's ‘client group' approach. It needs more work to be understood fully".
The Right Deal is a new model of service delivery which has drawn on the lessons learnt from OSW's Equal pilots and other programmes, identifying what services need to be delivered to address the multiple barriers that homeless people face in trying to access sustainable employment, and assessing how much the services will cost. The diagram below illustrates the Right Deal model:
What next?
At Crisis, we will continue to promote the Right Deal through the Crisis Welfare Network, and through our employment service delivery programmes. We will continue to gather evidence on what works for homeless people securing employment, and actively promote those findings to influence the new Coalition Government's Work Programme.
Download the Right Deal report
Construction photographs used in the report provided by kind permission of Tyneside Cyrenians.
For further information on the Right Deal, please contact Michael Fothergill on 020 7426 8504.
Footnotes
1 FEANTSA EWG paper ‘Multiple Barriers, Multiple Efforts: Employment Barriers and Solutions for homeless individuals', Linda Butcher, OSW, August 2006
2 Reducing Dependency, increasing opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work, An independent report to the Department for Work and Pensions, David Freud, January 2007
