Last week IPPR North and Justlife launched “Nowhere Fast: the journey in and out of unsupported temporary accommodation”, presenting challenging recommendations to both policy makers and practitioners. So, we spent some time with our staff teams in Brighton and Manchester looking at how these recommendations could and will impact and shape our services.
Just to recap and summarise, the four policy and practice recommendations for improving unsupported temporary accommodation (UTA) in the report are:
1.To establish Temporary Accommodation Boards
2.To create and maintain “Greenlists” and “Exclusion lists”
3.To develop a clear set of standards for the temporary accommodation sub-market
4.To provide proper in-tenancy support to manage the stay of tenants in UTA to prevent the in/out cycle
We intend to influence local and national government to make meaningful change for the tenants of UTA with these recommendations; but in the meantime we have been looking at them internally.
Last week, staff had the opportunity to come together during two staff days to grapple with these recommendations and think through what their implications were for the work we do. Christa Maciver, having recently finished a programme on Systems Change, led the workshops alongside Alex Fleming. The sessions incorporated tools used from the Systems Changers programme to help the staff think, write and talk about the recommendations. The sessions were motivating and very fruitful, with teams in both Brighton and Manchester developing ideas of what each of these recommendations could look like on a practical, daily basis and how we could start to implement these now.
We now have a pile of ideas and initiatives and over the next few months we will be piloting some of these ideas in Justlife and are excited to see where this stage in the life of Justlife will lead.
