Outreach workers in Scottish cities can make instant payouts of up to £200 for anything from haircuts to hotel rooms as part of a radical approach to entrenched rough sleeping.
The funding, directly from the Scottish government, is being made available to frontline staff working with the hard core of street homeless who refuse to engage with services or access any accommodation on offer.
They can now commit to on-the-spot spending to pay for clothing, copies of lost documents or even a night in a nearby hotel to help build trust with some of the hardest to reach members of the street community.
Hugh Hill, the director of services at the homelessness charity Simon Community Scotland, describes it as “out of the box thinking to connect with people who won’t connect with anything, regardless of how tough that life may be”.
Outreach workers for the Glasgow-based charity who have used the new fund in the city centre over the winter told the Guardian about the dramatic difference this instant flexibility has made to their work, both in terms of their ability to think creatively about people’s needs and to build confidence that they can respond positively to their circumstances. Larger spends of up to £2,000 are discussed back at base with a senior manager.
This week, legislation has come into force imposing legal duties on English councils to prevent homelessness. But charities say it fails to address the factors – including changes to the welfare system and council cuts – driving the rise in rough sleeping, which has increased south of the border for seven consecutive years.
The Scottish and UK governments have committed to eradicating rough sleeping, with the Conservatives’ 2017 election manifesto pledging to do so by 2027, and the SNP government experimenting with more flexible outreach options.
The personal budgets for outreach workers were put in place by the housing minister, Kevin Stewart, over the winter in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen as part of recommendations from the Scottish government’s homelessness and rough sleeping action group chaired by Jon Sparkes, the chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis.
“We’ve been using the fund daily, and it’s made a big difference knowing it is there to fall back on”, said Megan Thomson, the chair of the Simon Community’s interagency street network in Glasgow. The charity was given £250,000 to fund the personal budgets in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and estimates that about half was spent over the winter.
“There weren’t as many big spends as we thought there would be,” said Thomson, explaining that much of the funding has been spent on purchases that were “a drop in the ocean”, while making a huge difference to the individuals concerned.
“Little things like a haircut or a shave are a big deal. We’ve spent £8 to get someone’s clothes properly laundered. He was aggressive and threatening to everyone else but now he has a good relationship with the laundry staff. It’s all about establishing trust.”
Thomson has many examples of relatively small outlays making a big difference: £10 for a copy of an old bank statement or a birth certificate, one of the many forms of identity essential to accessing basic support but repeatedly lost in the chaos of life on the streets; £160 for a television for a family fleeing violence who had two young children in need of entertainment in a strange city; some coins for the gas meter for a young woman tempted back on to the streets because her temporary flat was so cold.
Stewart describes the personal budgets as “key to ensuring that frontline staff can employ maximum flexibility to meet immediate needs”. In addition to announcing extra funding to continue the scheme into the summer, he is working with the homelessness sector to develop a national model of flexible outreach, expected in early May.
The ability to make spending decisions on the spot has given outreach workers more confidence, said Jim Thompson, who spent time on the streets before working with the Simon Community. “You know you have the power to make decisions there and then.”
“The guys we work with have really complex needs around drugs, alcohol addiction, begging, and you have to find out what the answer is to those needs. This helps us cut out the middle man and build trust with them – and the results are amazing.”
He describes one young man, who had been living on the street for years and consistently refused to engage with services, despite his worsening health. “Through this fund, we put him up in the Travelodge in Queen Street for a couple of nights, and then got him into hospital.
“If we hadn’t had access to the fund we would have lost him. He’d been injecting into his groin and they found a tunnel of infection all down his leg. He needed intravenous antibiotics for six weeks. He began to trust us because we could get him that bed for the night. It’s like heaven when you’ve not slept well for years.”