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Social exclusion and conflicting agendas

April 09 2012
New report suggests that incompatible priorities between homeless people and support agencies are keeping people on the streets

 

Support agencies are ostensibly there to provide support for homeless people, but can often be handicapped from doing so by a system that is rife with conflicting agendas. This is the basis of a new report by researchers at the University of Salford and Nottingham Trent University.

The HOME Study: Comparing the priorities of multiply excluded homeless people (MEHPs) and support agencies, authored by Professor Peter Dwyer (Salford) and Drs Graham Bowpitt, Eva Sundin and Mark Weinstein (Nottingham), was compiled via a series of interviews with 108 MEHPs and 44 representatives from voluntary and statutory agencies.

“During the summer of 2008, I saw the proposed Multiple Exclusion Homelessness Research Programme from the when the Economic and Social Research Council as an opportunity to explore my belief that incompatible priorities between homeless people and support agencies were keeping people on the streets,” recalls Dr Bowpitt.

“The overall aim was to explore the priorities and compatibility of MEHPs and the support agencies with which they came into contact. Our hypothesis was that there was something in the way that certain services operated that failed to take account of the factors that drive homeless people and which made services inaccessible or unacceptable. This stems from systems of public accountability or financial management that services are obliged to satisfy, but which sometimes impose conditions on homeless people that they either cannot, or feel disinclined, to meet.”

Central to the project was working alongside peer researchers (former homeless people) who interviewed homeless people alongside an academic member of the research team. Following the conclusion of the research and its subsequent publication, the team’s original hypothesis was borne out to a large extent with a number of key findings:

MEHP priorities are not fixed but evolve with changing circumstances and experiences. Agencies that work with MEHPs identify a range of disparate priorities according to the ways in which they operate.

A tension between support and intervention agendas is apparent in the work of many agencies that interact with multiply excluded homeless people. A significant number of MEHPs view agencies, rightly or wrongly, as prioritising their own agendas above meeting the needs and concerns of MEHPs.

While many support agencies share the priorities of multiply excluded homeless people to an extent, most are constrained to varying degrees by other agendas (found to be especially true of mainstream statutory services that do not specialise in the needs of this user group).

The report has received positive feedback from practitioners and policy-makers, and a DVD has been produced to convey the findings in an accessible format for service users. Professor Dwyer and Dr Bowpitt are keen to see the results of the research utilised as much as possible by the agencies supporting MEHPs. Professor Dwyer: “Ideally, we would like it (the report) to add weight to the idea that personalised flexible provision for homeless people with complex needs is the best way to tackle the homelessness of the most excluded and to stimulate further debate about the structural barriers that often get in the way of certain homeless people being able to access help.”

Dr Bowpitt: “We’ve presented two workshops attended by homelessness service providers, who told us that our findings have informed service planning and patterns of service delivery. Where we have identified services that work well, we have been able to make our evidence available to strengthen an agency’s defence against threatened spending cuts. We would like to see an end to all statutory regulations that serve as barriers to homeless people securing the help they need to come off the streets.”

< Woman?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s foot set alight by homeless man Becoming invisible, part II >
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