The economic and social benefits of housing support

Housing Support plays a vital role in securing accommodation, care and other services for many of our most vulnerable in society.

However it is a model (or series of models) where practice knowledge runs far ahead of both policy and academic or research expertise and evidence.

Housing Support is often much less visible, can be fragmented and is much less transparent than other parts of the funding of our housing, health and other social care services.

It is recommended that:

(1) effort is expended to highlight that Housing Support in its different forms can make significant positive impacts on people’s lives alongside important preventative public finance savings.

(2) The sector should promote more visible examples of Housing Support, drawing on key messages in this report.

(3) Two further pieces of research should be supported and widely publicised.

The first of these is a proper mapping and accounting of all Housing Support funding streams, scale and partners.

Second, a research project is required to bottom out the costs and benefits, preventative savings and the social value of Housing Support.

Why Housing Support? Debates on the position of the housing sector in social policy and welfare have been dominated by framings around financialisation and commodification, availability, tenure and supply of housing.

This has overlooked the wrap-around services that can be termed Housing Support. The variety of Housing Support activity is diverse, with the full scale and variety of support mechanisms made more complex by national and local divergence.

Furthermore, the different policy settings and assumptions behind housing policy – and what the housing problem constitutes – differ across levels of government (Gibb 2021).

This affects the possibilities and availability of Housing Support services. The ideology behind providing this type of service diverges between England, Scotland and Wales.

Several models of support aim to facilitate positive outcomes across groups and tenure. A table in the main report outlines some of the key evidence around particular models. An appendix also sets out the continuum of housing support models.

Much of the focus in this paper is on social impact and preventative benefits. Prevention is about spending now to save later or, in other terms, to reduce failure demand by tackling causes in the present to reduce symptoms in the future.

Puttock (2012, p.5) defines a preventative strategy as one which disrupts, mitigates or eliminates causes of harm through the identification, implementation and diffusion of effective interventions.

In 2010, the Scottish Government promised a decisive shift to prevention and set up specific funds relating to older people’s services, early years intervention and reducing reoffending.

Progress has been patchy and uneven and takes time. The wide range of Housing Support activities is funded by multiple, more or less visible and identifiable sources: services differentiate between the housing tenure people are in, for access to benefits, whether funding comes from non-ring-fenced council budgets, distinguishing capital from revenue spent (including benefits), among other complicating factors.

This has implications for accurate reporting of spending on Housing Support directly in the round, but also our ability to connect it to other activities which depend on it. There is a pressing challenge for national-level statistical analysis in Scotland to address this gap.

For further reading: Economic benefits of housing supports