Public bodies and homelessness prevention: working towards a prevention duty

The Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan sets out the intention of Scottish Government and COSLA to ‘work with public bodies, housing providers and other partners to develop a new duty on local authorities, wider public bodies and delivery partners for the prevention of homelessness’. 

The aim of this research is to identify what introducing homeless prevention legislation would be like for a broad range of people that would be impacted. It does this through conducting and analysing interviews with people in three types of role (strategic management, frontline, service user) within health, police and education. This research presents findings on and identifies recommendations around the following themes:

- Knowledge of homelessness
- Increasing awareness of prevention
- Cultures of help
- Language and motivation
- Local focus
- Voluntary sector
- Housing resources
- Implementation process