The background to the strategy and SMART Action Plans

The West Midlands Regional Homelessness Strategy is designed to help reduce homelessness in a number of ways; in particular by influencing policy and investment in housing at a regional and sub-regional level and

by encouraging more effective joint interventions across the region. It is intended to support local strategies and action plans by improving cross boundary, cross sector and cross tenure work where appropriate.

The strategy suggested some key recommendations that are focused on encouraging and supporting joint action between Local Authorities, service providers such as the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and service providers in the third sector. As we note in the full report these issues of joint working were recurrent themes in the workshops held in each of the housing market areas in 2006.

One of the key recommendations from the strategy was that a Regional Homelessness Strategy Implementation Group (RHSIG) be established and they were given the task of developing action plans to promote a collaborative approach to tackling and preventing homelessness in the Housing Market Areas or sub-regions.

We believe that these action plans need to focus on delivering results that will create the climate and structures for joint working which in turn will help to deliver positive changes for homeless or potentially homeless people.

This platform of joint working will help to maximise the impact of local structures and harness local energy. Once we have created momentum more challenging results can be built on this platform, for example we can start with small results such as developing a cross authority rent deposit scheme with the private rented sector and then build to actions which promote joint strategic approaches with landlords on prevention of homelessness or shared cross authority approaches to developing and sustaining the social rented sector in a housing market area.

We conclude that part of this work is to practically demonstrate that there are occasions when acting jointly across the sub-regions, and across service boundaries, will deliver better results than working alone.

So the context for the action plans is improving outcomes for homeless and potentially homeless people through demonstrating it can be done differently, by sharing problems and solutions, and by being able to identify and then act upon the things we do best alone and best together.