A decade on: Charles Fraser, St Mungo's

Charles Fraser, CEO of St Mungo's, has been working in the homelessness sector for 30 years... As we celebrated the 10 year anniversary of CONNECT magazine, in our summer 2010 issue, we asked Charles to tell us what he thinks have been the sector's biggest milestones over the last decade and the new challenges facing homelessness services.

What do you think are the biggest milestones / achievements of the homelessness sector over the past 10 years?

• The role the voluntary sector played in meeting the 2002 government target to reduce rough sleeping by two-thirds was exceptional
• The Hostel Capital Programme,  Places of Change, has been a fantastic initiative to improve the physical environment in emergency accommodation projects
• Within London, getting the Greater London Authority (GLA) involved in further reducing rough sleeping has been a real achievement
• The voluntary sector generally (and not just homelessness agencies) has made enormous progress with client involvement.  Although we have to guard against our organisations becoming 'total institutions', this development has been almost entirely positive.

And the disappointments?

• The disbandment of the Rough Sleepers Unit: the experiment of a unit semi-detached from Whitehall and with its own direct political line of responsibility was an interesting one that deserved to be pursued for a bit longer
• Local Authority Procurement – a three card trick in value for money terms, since the (considerable) cost is shunted from the purchaser to the provider
• Places of Change wanted to promise a new way of working, but could not deliver the engagement from either health or employment.
• To some extent Supporting People has been a missed opportunity. The promised needs projections and service review rigour have given way to price-at-all-costs.

What do you hope will happen in the next ten years?
Homelessness is presented as a problem but, as a colleague pointed out to me many years ago, for many of those affected it is a solution – a solution to a fractured life with little prospects in the bleaker parts of Britain.  I would like to see a robust strategy preventing homelessness, and ultimately this means much better investment in jobs and housing in the regions of Britain.

For several years we have called on the Government to introduce a legal Right to Shelter.  This would cost little, and would symbolise a society’s determination to abolish absolute destitution.

Most of our residents want to work, and yet most are too ill to do so.  I  want to see a more coherent approach to primary care, and one which involves treatment for substance dependence and mental health conditions.  I want to see intermediate care spread more widely, and better support for the self-management of health.

Two-thirds of St Mungo’s residents have been unemployed for more than 5 years, and so I want to see programmes constructed and funded which help people progress – in  psychological terms from 'being' to 'doing',  through to 'working', in a way which allows for dead ends, relapses and false starts.

How has your work and / or organisation changed over the years?
Like many homelessness organisations, we have seen a complete sea-change in attitudes to what an acceptable service looks like.  Our buildings and our staffing are unimaginably better than they were 30 years ago and this is thanks to enormous and sustained support from donors, government and local authorities.  We cannot take this support for granted, and yet its continuation is absolutely critical to enabling us to continue to provide and develop our services.

Every aspect of our work has become hugely more technical, whether it is client support, fundraising investment or staff training and development. This increased complexity has some advantages, but it must never become a substitute for the fundamental human connection between our staff and our clients.

One of the biggest changes at St Mungo’s has been the adoption of the recovery approach.  Not only is this progressive, but it gave us for the first time a theory that was robust enough to span our entire range of services.

What's next for the homelessness sector? What are the challenges now?
It’s quite difficult to view the homelessness sector as a 'sector'.  This is partly because we all compete against each other.  Despite this competition, there are arguably still too many organisations.

The challenge is to be able to stand back a bit from the contract battles and ensure that an organisation remains relevant and is providing services that people want and need, in a way that helps them.

How can we prevent more people from ending up homeless in the future?
My view is that rough sleepers are drawn from a wider pool of single homeless people, and that these in turn are drawn from still wider pools of those whose situation is precarious, whether that is in housing, work or health terms.  It follows from this that effective prevention must address that precariousness by strengthening housing, health and employment services, and identifying and supporting those at risk.

Final comments:
As a sector we don’t cope very well with threats. In London, for example, we work very constructively with most local authority partners, but there is still a role for Pan-London services, and articulating this in the face of a tidal wave of support for localism is something that agencies can best do collectively through Homeless Link, and other umbrella organisations.

Find out more

To find out more about St Mungo's visit: www.mungos.org