This year marks 18 years of our Annual Review (now Support to End Homelessness), Homeless Link’s national study on the support delivered by the homelessness sector, which continues to provide crucial evidence to inform policy and practice.
Support to End Homelessness is a snapshot of where the homelessness sector is each year, what challenges it’s facing, and how our collective work is making a difference. It’s more than just a report, it’s a way of capturing the voices of our members, measuring the impact of policy change, reflecting the realities on the ground, and turning that knowledge into actionable insight.
Who is it for and how is it useful?
By exploring key trends in single homelessness and the nature and availability of support, the research aims to help service providers, commissioners, local authorities, and policy makers understand and respond to the needs of people experiencing homelessness. The findings are based on key data sources, including:
- a survey of accommodation providers and day centres from across England
- data from the Homeless England database
- national government statistics.
The comprehensive nature of this analysis allows us to assess not only the current state of single homelessness provision, but to identify and analyse historic trends.
What does nearly two decades of doing this tell us?
Our annual work on the report shows that as a membership body, we’ve been committed to listening and learning consistently for 18 years. That longevity means we can trace patterns and shifts - how services have adapted, how policy has changed, and how resilience and creativity keep showing up in spite of the challenges faced by a sector that is shrinking in size even as the number of people who rely on it increases.
How do we gather this insight?
What we learn for each new edition of Support to End Homelessness is based on a huge collective effort of organisations responding to our surveys. We send out surveys to more than 900 organisations inviting them to take part. Once the surveys have closed our research team turn this data into insight by analysing the survey findings, adding knowledge from our extensive policy and practice work to provide depth and context to our reporting.
Our reports are the fullest analysis of the learning for each edition of Support to End Homelessness, but we also write blogs and slide decks, and present webinars to share our learning with the sector and to make this insight as accessible and as useful as possible.
What does this insight tell us?
The insight we gain from this work is rich and varied. It tells us what support organisations need most and in recent years shows the depth of the financial strain organisations in the sector are under, with last year 67% of accommodation services reporting that lack of inflationary increases alone mean that their services risk becoming financially non-viable. This insight also demonstrates the urgent needs that our sector meets, and points to the ways in which the homelessness sector has become a shadow health and care sector. Our findings show that services are increasingly supporting people with overlapping support needs and last year, for the first time, found that every accommodation provider responding to our survey faces barriers in accessing vital mental health services for those they support.
What do we do with this insight?
Once we have this insight, we use it. It informs our advocacy with government and funders, strengthens our training and resources, and guides how we support members day to day. Writing it up into a research report means that all of this insight is equally available to our members, the wider sector, and to decision makers, as we continue to make the case for the changes that we all want to see.
Today, we have launched the survey for the 2025 Support to End Homelessness report and invites to contribute to that survey have gone out. If you haven’t received this and think you should have, please contact Cate.
