The new Labour government recently announced a policy of Standard Determinate Sentences 40 (known as SDS40) under which people in prison will be released when they have served 40% of their sentence. This has brought additional focus to the challenges of ensuring that people leaving prison have adequate housing on release. Vicky Album explains:
I’ve been working in the homelessness field for nearly 25 years. Worryingly, in that time the challenge of preventing homelessness for people released from prison has been ever present.
In one of my early roles as a housing advice worker, I visited young people in HMP YOI Rochester (more commonly known as Borstal). I was tasked with delivering housing advice so that young people weren’t discharged onto the streets. However at the time the system didn’t allow hostel beds to be booked in advance, so in reality the young people just had to take their chances on their release day. At best these prison visits enabled us to complete an early assessment and begin securing ID documents. At worst, they gave false hope about the prospect of having somewhere to stay on release.
Since then, the Criminal Justice System has been through significant changes but preventing homelessness on release has remained a challenge. The Transforming Rehabilitation programme was tasked with delivering Through the Gate (TTG) services so that people were referred into housing and other much-needed support before release. But in 2016 these were found by HM Inspectorate of Probation to have “consistently failed” to meet offenders’ resettlement needs.
In recent years, several housing programmes have attempted to relieve some of the pressure for people being released to no fixed address. Through CAS3, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) funds temporary accommodation for people being discharged into homelessness, and Accommodation for Ex-Offenders (AFEO) funding enables local authorities to support prison-leavers into the private rented sector. In addition, the Rough Sleepers’ Accommodation Programme has been central in many areas to providing housing solutions for people on release.
Despite these programmes, homelessness service providers across the country continue to report challenges with people being discharged from prison to the streets. Reasons for this can include failure of process within prisons, lack of communication between partner agencies or an unwillingness of the person themselves to admit that they have no address for fear of delaying their release. There is inevitable concern that with SDS40, increased numbers of people discharged to homelessness will exacerbate the existing challenges.
With this in mind, we have been seeking emerging and promising practices that are being tested in areas to overcome some of the ongoing issues. This includes areas like Kent which has established pre-release panels to prepare housing solutions for people at risk of homelessness on release who fall between the gaps of existing multi-agency panels like MAPPA. Other areas such as Worcestershire and Lincolnshire have gone a step further and developed system-wide protocols which map out clear lines of responsibility throughout the individual journey from court to prison and beyond.
We have collated information about these, and other inspiring models, on our new resource page and at the same time our policy team are engaging with colleagues at the Ministry of Justice and MHCLG to advocate for what the sector needs in this space. So….
- Take a look at our resource page for emerging practices here
- Get in touch if you have examples of good work to share
- Pass on information about changes you’re seeing to our policy team
