Housing First with Nicholas Pleace

Nicholas Pleace joins Imogen to discuss Housing First strategies, the European context, and how this approach is transforming homelessness services across the UK and beyond.

 

Nicholas and I first worked together on the Housing First Feasibility Study for the Liverpool City Region (Crisis, 2017): full report; summary version.

Housing First Guide Europe (2016), Nicholas Pleace for FEANTSA https://www.feantsa.org/download/hfg_full_digital1907983494259831639.pdf

Discussed in the podcast:

US sociologist, Teresa Gowan identified 3 caricatures of homelessness: ‘sin-talk’, ‘sick-talk’ and ‘system-talk’, as described here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334047769_Street_Talk_Homeless_Discourses_and_the_Politics_of_Service_Provision

Malcolm Gladwell: Million-Dollar Murray: The New Yorker, 02/05/2006: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray

Blood, Birchall & Pleace (2021) Reducing, Changing, or Ending Housing First support, Homeless Link: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/197890/1/Reducing_changing_or_ending_Housing_First_support_2021_full_report.pdf

Sam Tsemberis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Tsemberis

In ‘A Traumatised System’ for Riverside, Nicholas and I describe the commissioning context for UK homelessness services: https://www.riverside.org.uk/care-and-support/homelessness-research-and-reports/a-traumatised-system/

Supporting People programme: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/rp12-40/

Housing First Fidelity Framework: we’ve recently published the framework Nicholas, Anita Birchall and I produced in 2019 here: https://www.imogenblood.co.uk/_files/ugd/775f77_2ccae7cd607e433da5c553c59081cd31.pdf

 

Imogen runs a social research consultancy Imogen Blood & Associates:

https://www.imogenblood.co.uk/

She also provides MSC training:

https://www.seralliance.org/

 

Chapters

 

00:00 - Nicholas’s research background

3:15 - Adapting Housing First into the European context

5:15 - What is Housing First?

9:45 - Why does it work for individuals?

13:15 - Systems change and Housing First

15:52 - Evidence-based intervention in homelessness

19:00 - Housing First’s origins in the US

23:28 - Finland’s Housing First strategy

26:02 - How Housing First developed in the UK

34:00 - Comparison to Housing First in Italy

35:30 - Impact of housing, health and care shortages on Housing First

39:00 - Too thinly spread to have strategic impact

43:50 - Preventing future demand

48:27 - Lack of join up

51:02 - Lack of step-up/ step-down options

56:06 - What is needed?

1:00:35 - The narrative gets in the way

1:06:50 - Housing First as part of mental health pathway?

1:12:50 - Fidelity to the model

1:21:03 - End