The lessons we can’t afford to ignore: looking back at 30 years of supported housing funding as we campaign to secure its future

Home is the foundation for our lives, and we should all be able to live in a home that supports our health, wellbeing, and independence. At its best, supported housing has the power to transform lives. Whether for older people with care and support needs, people with learning disabilities or young people leaving care, it gives thousands of people across the country a safe place to call home. 

To anyone working in the sector, this is clear. But what is also clear is that the current funding system is not working, and people who need a supported home are not always able to access one, with many providers even having to close much-needed services. 

As we begin our Future of Supported Housing project, in partnership with think tank New Local, we’ve deep-dived into the last 30 years of supported housing funding. In this blog, we’ll delve into what lessons we can learn from looking back at the past, and how we can take these learnings into the future. 

Lesson one: we need a whole systems approach 

By examining the past 30 years of supported housing funding, we can see that the sector has been exposed to fragmented - and at times haphazard - policymaking.  

The removal of ring-fenced funding through the Supporting People programme fractured funding streams, causing a reduction in supported housing, and crucially, a loss of strategic oversight and valuable data about the size of the sector, quality and outcomes. More than 20 years on, recent research shows us that the reasons the Supporting People was introduced in 2003 are largely still applicable today: a lack of strategic oversight, division of accountability and inadequate targeting of resources to meet need.  

Looking to the future, we must make sure funding strategies are once again linked to stronger and clearer oversight of supported housing need, quality and outcomes, with the data to support decisions about how and where money is spent. The lessons of the past show that any strategy to secure the future of the sector must consider the whole system in which supported housing sits.  

Crucial to this is better integration with other public services, particularly the NHS, recognising the system-wide value of supported housing.  
There are good examples of strong partnership working between health and housing providers in some local areas. For example, the Greater Manchester Tripartite Agreement between the Integrated Care Partnership, Combined Authority and Greater Manchester Housing Providers, which is leading to a more joined up conversation about supported housing, and its value to people and the wider system. 

But integration and partnership working is currently patchy, with success largely dependent on individual relationships. The challenge is how to scale this up, exploring national mechanisms to promote new place-based opportunities such as Neighborhood Health and place-based budgets, and building a cross-sector consensus on the future of supported housing. 

Lesson two: long-term funding matters 

Since the end of Supporting People and subsequent reductions in funding, local authority commissioners have tended to reduce the length of their contracts for support services, with limited long-term planning. This has created an uncertain environment for providers of transitional supported housing, and for the people who rely on a home with support, who are sometimes forced to leave supported housing before they are ready, perpetuating a cycle of re-entering the system. 

Short-term funding cycles make it harder for providers to develop new services and to recruit and retain talented staff. With fewer resources to draw on, this makes it particularly challenging for smaller, more specialist organisations to thrive. 

The sector’s history shows longer-term and ringfenced revenue funding could have a big impact on supported housing, giving providers the confidence and security to develop and deliver much needed supported homes. In the 2023 Supported Housing Review, both commissioners and providers supported a move to longer-term commissioning cycles, showing a broad consensus across the sector. 

Lesson three: prevention improves lives and reduces costs 

The removal of the Supporting People ringfence also led to a shift in services being prioritised for those most in need. With funding less reliable and scarcer, resources were prioritised for those facing crisis, leading to a reduction in preventative services that could stop people reaching this crisis point in the first place.  

This is particularly sharply felt in homelessness services, where providers have repeatedly called this a false economy, leading to people developing higher, more complex needs and requiring more costly, resource intensive interventions.   

If spending was redirected towards preventative supported housing and housing-related support, over time we would see a reduction in the amount of people reaching crisis point.  

Next steps 

Going forward, the lessons we’ve learnt by looking back are key to where the sector needs to go now.  

We can clearly see how the Supporting People programme made big improvements in accountability and quality of support, and how the removal of the ringfence reduced the amount of supported housing, created unmet need and caused a loss of strategic oversight.   

Our Future of Supported Housing project will develop evidence-based recommendations, which reflect the diverse range of services and people supported by the sector. From our research so far, we can see that solutions must be rooted in a whole-systems, place-based approach that values prevention and enables more effective spending of existing funding. 

If we get this right, more people will have a safe, supported home when they need it — not after they have reached crisis point. That means building a shared recognition across housing, health, care and government that supported housing matters. That we must invest in it as a vital part of our public services: one that gives people stability, independence and the chance to live well.