Homeless people are to be helped into permanent accommodation, regardless of their circumstances, as part of a five-year project to be run by Prince William’s foundation and supported by the England footballer Tyrone Mings.
The project, called Homewards, which emulates one run in Finland, will be launched initially in six areas around the UK and is aimed at preventing homelessness where possible and ensuring any incidence is “rare, brief and unrepeated”. The Prince of Wales’s charitable foundation is giving £3m of startup funding to the project.
Launching the scheme on Monday, Mings spoke of his own experience of homelessness as a child, saying it was an upsetting time.
“We went through a period of turbulence, instability, and were rehoused in an emergency accommodation facility. And, as children, we were probably much more adaptable than adults are, but it brought us together. It was definitely a period that was unstable, it was a struggle, it was unnerving at times,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“What was the accommodation like? Scary, for sure, for a child to be in an environment where laundry services are communal.”
He said his family had stuck together, showing each other love and support, and that positives had come from the experience – not least his involvement in the new scheme.
The chair of the Royal Foundation, the former foreign secretary and Conservative party leader William Hague, described how the scheme would focus initially on providing permanent housing, rather than placing people in temporary accommodation, while they tried to fix issues in their lives. Areas chosen could receive support of up to £500,000 to put in place their chosen measures.
Hague told the Today programme that a similar scheme in Finland had helped reduce homelessness, adding that the nature of the project, under which government, local services and private businesses worked together, meant different areas could come up with their own individual solutions.
He said Prince William had briefed various government departments, as well as opposition parties, on the homelessness scheme being launched in the UK.
William said: “In a modern and progressive society, everyone should have a safe and secure home, be treated with dignity and given the support they need.” The prince, patron of the homelessness charities Centrepoint and The Passage, will begin a two-day tour of the UK on Monday to launch the project.
The six chosen areas have not yet been announced. They were selected after a bidding process and their findings will be used to create models that can adopted in other parts of the UK.
There are about 300,000 people experiencing homelessness across the UK on any given night, according to Matt Downie, the chief executive of the charity Crisis, one of the partner organisations of the Homewards project.
Downie said the factors pushing people into homelessness were complex, citing a severe shortage of genuinely affordable homes, rising rents, the increasing cost of living, years of low wages and insecure work that had left people unable to cope with sudden economic shocks and a welfare system unable to support them.
He said relying on temporary housing, such as hostels, was costing billions, adding: “Homelessness is not inevitable, as a provider of services to thousands of people across Britain every year. We know that in most cases it’s preventable, and in every case it can be ended.
“The best way to tackle homelessness is to stop it happening in the first place. We’ve seen it in other countries such as Finland, where homelessness is all but ended, and we’ve seen it when we follow innovative programmes that give people housing first.
“We know we can do the same here with the right choices and by working together. With levels of homelessness only set to increase innovative programmes like Homewards are more necessary than ever.”
