Welcome to the West Midlands Homelessness Strategy Implementation Group website

The regional Homelessness Strategy for the West Midlands has a grand ambition

Our vision for our homelessness strategy is to support the emergence of a World Class Region and improve the quality of life by preventing homelessness, improving support services and access to decent secure housing.

In order to achieve this, we need to understand how to tackle both the accommodation and non-accommodation needs of people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. The first regional homelessness strategy did much to identify the parts of our region where housing demand can never be met through existing supply even if this were to be allocated and managed in different ways. This information and subsequent recommendations were included within the regional housing strategy and informed and influenced decisions on sub-regional funding allocations. Much more needs to be done but the principle has been won.

The regional homelessness strategy implementation group includes key representatives from the statutory, voluntary and business sectors who can influence services and responses to the non-accommodation needs of people who are homeless or at risk. All members of this group have volunteered their contribution, including those from statutory services. We have a seat on the Regional Housing Executive and are therefore able to inform and influence housing strategy and policy on an ongoing basis.

However, education, training, employment, health and support are equally important if we are going to prevent the cycle of homelessness.

Often services do not have co-terminous boundaries, have different priorities and different delivery structures. This makes working together in a cohesive way challenging. The regional group has found a new and energising way of working which places the improved outcomes for homeless people as our objective and working back from that, identifies what we can best do together and what we can better do individually but from a collectively informed base.

Our sub-regional action plans use this format and realistically identify what can be developed by one sub-region and shared with our other sister sub-regions, to maximise effort and minimise duplication and waste.

This website has been developed to create a real-time way of monitoring progress and sharing learning. I hope you find this helpful and that you will contribute to our progress and learning across the region and that in the West Midlands fewer people become homeless and those that do become homeless are helped to sustain settled homes and lifestyles and do not become homeless again.

Jean Templeton
Chair of WMRHSIG

As well as being a space for those involved in the regional work in the West Midlands the web site has a series of open forums that can be used to post questions or raise issues related to homelessness strategy etc by people with an interest in the issues raised by the strategy.

Use the links at the top of the page to have a look at the forums.