This is the Rural Homelessness Podcast, where we discuss the important issues around rural homelessness, hear from those affected by it, and offer some solutions. Brought to you by the award-winning Homelessness Charity, The Fairy Project, welcome to the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast. I'm your host, Matt McCleary. Thanks so much for clicking over here and joining in with this very important conversation. Today, we are going to be zooming in on the whole topic of rural homelessness, and in today's show, I am joined by the chair of the Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition, Rory Wheel. So, why don't we dive straight in and welcome Rory to the show? Hello Rory and welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to have you with us today. You are the chair of Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition. Could we start off by you explaining what is the Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition? Yeah, I'm happy to, so we are a coalition of over 25 organisations that are committed to ending homelessness in rural communities. And we were formed when a variety of housing associations and housing providers came together with the representatives of rural communities out of a shared recognition that there was a growing crisis in rural communities across England that wasn't getting the attention that it needed and deserved, and as a result, many people were going without the essentials and going without a roof over their heads because of our collective failure as a society to provide adequate support and provision. So the coalition was set up off the back of a research report which found that rural homelessness was rising and had been rising in recent years, and through interviews with people who were experiencing homelessness, that could include kind of safer surfing, perhaps in kind of family or friends places, or it could include kind of staying, living in woods, in tents, in barns and outhouses, so real range of experiences. And this research kind of pulled together interviews with people that had those experiences and really shone a light on how ignored and isolated many of those people were. So we formed the coalition out of a recognition that that was unacceptable, that we wanted to tackle it, that we believed that it could be tackled. Since then we've been trying to raise awareness, attention and increase the amount of support that go into communities for individuals that are at risk of homelessness because no one should have to spend the night without a roof on their heads, that's something we fundamentally believe. And I must say, working with the ferry project based here in East Anglia and in the fence, that a lot of what you've said about the lack of recognition and the struggles that people who are homeless in rural areas have rings true for us and the clients that we deal with as well. So yes, you're right, it is a nationwide problem. And it's one of those things, isn't it, where when people think of homelessness, just the perception of homelessness itself seems to be urban based. Homeless, you think of someone on the street or you think of someone sort of on a bench but in a city or in a shop doorway, you don't think of someone under a hedge on the side of a farmer's field somewhere, it isn't an image that comes to mind. So I guess raising awareness is trying to help that perception to change, is that right? Absolutely. And I think images are very powerful things and you can have all the kind of evidence in the world. But often when you're trying to make change happen, you have to engage with the mental images that people have, the perceptions they have. And you're absolutely right that homelessness as a term and as a concept is something which is associated with cities, in many ways that has a kind of logic to it, it's much more visible in town to cities. Cities and towns do struggle with very high and unacceptably high levels of homelessness. But it's about the kind of hidden nature of homelessness in rural communities. People don't have that image at the forefront of their minds, unlike they do if they were say kind of perhaps walking through London, because that homelessness is less visible in rural communities. So it requires a much more proactive effort to shine a spotlight on it, to tell the stories. And it's why one of the projects that we're currently working on is a photography project, which is looking at how we depict homelessness and to try and improve in the media, create a more diverse sense and image of what homelessness is. So challenging the idea that it's just, for example, in much of the media coverage, if you look at a story around homelessness, you'd often see the depiction of probably usually a man, probably maybe perhaps mid-laged, outside a tube station or in a very urban environment. And that's one particular experience, an experience that is certainly there, but there's an awful lot more that's going on. And we need to kind of create these images in our media and in our society that reflect the diversity of the experience, because that's how we start to change people's perceptions. And that's how we start to change what people think the solutions are. And that's when kind of, yeah, real change, lasting change for all our communities happens. That's really good. You might have already covered this in a previous answer, because I want to ask you what promoted the birth of the coalition. You've already mentioned this piece of research. But is there some kind of sort of story, or did something happen to prompt this research in the first place? What was that sort of original kind of mustard seed idea that's now led to the growth of this coalition? Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people in the coalition kind of have different kind of stories or journeys for kind of getting to hear. Probably the most relevant of my own was I was working at St. Mungo's at the time, which is kind of homeless as charity, provides a lot of service provision for people experiencing homeless as a kind of a cross, primarily the south of England. And in the late 2010s, we'd seen increases in levels of rough sleeping that were quite dramatic. That was the result of changes in policy, that's affordable housing, that's money for local authorities, and that was having an effect in communities. And it was in about kind of 2020 around 2018, where we started to see that there was this real uptick in need in smaller market towns. So for example, in, well, the part of the country that I'm from in Kent, towns like Maidstone, areas such as kind of say swale, fannet, Canterbury, not necessarily rural areas as such, but not cities, towns, market towns. And I think that was prompting kind of some concern that that rough sleeping was popping up in places where actually a few years ago, there was no visibility that there was no visible kind of crisis of rough sleeping, if you like. So it was in these areas where it started to be more visible, that I was really interested in exploring why that was, and whether we were kind of not identifying levels of need that were actually very, very high, but even less visible in the more rural areas. And that had certainly kind of come through anecdotally. Off the back of that, I did a piece of research actually in the United States where they'd had a big drive to tackle rural homelessness, and I was really interested in the fact that they were looking at rural homelessness as a distinct category, that they had a lot of research and evidence that we don't have in the UK. So I went over there on something called a Churchill Fellowship, which is a fun support kind of research into new areas and new policy issues. And I saw some really, really interesting things there. I saw communities that had created for the first time, outreach teams and support teams in rural communities that were using kind of better data. They were able to identify who was experiencing homelessness and when, and as a result, they were really able to kind of tackle the problem and address the root causes. So it was when I kind of came back with those findings and published them, I connected with a lot of different people that were saying, actually, this really resonates with what I'm seeing. And one of them is English Rural Housing Association, who kind of work in rural areas across the south of England. And they'd been seeing a lot of pressure in their communities and a lot of people that were at risk of homelessness and falling into homelessness who 10 years ago would never have been in that position. So these kind of threads came together. People all had their different journeys. But the coalition was kind of formed out of a collective recognition that there was something going on that was concerning and a resolution that we knew that there were changes that could be made to tackle the problem and kind of end homelessness as examples say from the United States or elsewhere showed. So yeah, it was a period of kind of intense collaboration. And it kind of came out of very, very high and worrying levels of needs. And as a result, we were able to kind of create something that brought together a diverse range of people with that shared commitment. You said that one of the things that interested you about the data from America was that rural homelessness was treated as a distinct category. So in your mind, in your view, is that justified? Is rural homelessness different from other types of homelessness? And if so, from your experience, how is rural homelessness a different type of homelessness? It's a really good question. And I think when we kind of talk about homelessness and the different types of homelessness, it's really important to also start with what is shared, which is that there's a common experience of homelessness and it always comes down in some way to the absence of appropriate housing. Right? So I think you have to start with a kind of common shared understanding. However, it can be useful to look at the differences of people's experiences because it allows you to kind of target your interventions, to look at where we're failing and where particular groups are falling through the net. So whether that's youth homelessness, which has its own kind of causes and drivers in some cases, whether that's homelessness affecting other groups that just kind of LGBT communities, actually when you kind of apply this lens, you're more able to identify failings that are specific to particular groups and communities. And rural homelessness is similar in many ways to that. It doesn't mean that it needs its own entire approach. It doesn't mean the experience is completely different, but it does mean that there are particular things and particular challenges which need to be overcome. And to answer your question about what those challenges are and what the difference is, I think the first one is isolation. So if I take the example of one of our advocates who has done a lot of work with the coalition, a guy called Frank who was experiencing homelessness in the southeast of England, just actually just outside wording, and he was camping in the woods there for over a year. He was there because he felt that the town centers were dangerous, he didn't feel safe there, he felt like he'd come off the back of evictions, he couldn't hold down housing as a result, and he kind of went into the woods and tried to be kind of self-sufficient there. And his story is quite remarkable because of how he didn't interact with any services, primarily in that time. He would occasionally go to perhaps a day center or a food bank, but the way he talks about it, he did feel really, really isolated from that support. Whereas if you're in a more urban environment and you're rough sleeping, you're much more likely to come across an outreach worker, a support worker, and there can be challenges with getting that support, but you're much more likely to have those interactions. In rural areas, you're not, because the services just aren't there, and that was a really isolating experience, and it actually took the provision of support and a kind of a particular interaction with a charity called Turning Tides for Frank to kind of be connected with the support he needed to find long-term housing, which he ended up doing, but that took much, much longer than you would hope, especially for somebody who clearly kind of was looking for that support and looking for that opportunity to kind of find long-term housing. So the differences are often about the lack of services, the isolation people see in experience. There are also differences often around stigma in rural communities. We often hear reports that it's much harder to provide services, attitudes, perhaps are sometimes more hostile. The flip side is that sometimes there is a kind of shared sense of community that you can tap into, which provides effective support for individuals like Frank. So it's definitely complex, but when you look at it, the reason why I think it's important to look at rural homelessness through that lens is because it allows us to challenge the idea it's just something that happens in urban areas, and that's important to build support for more affordable housing, more social housing. We often don't hear a conversation around social housing in rural areas, but the unaffordability of rural areas is really, really acute. So it allows us to kind of make the case for that, it allows us to identify that we need services in these communities because the need is there, even if it's less visible. So for all those reasons, it's useful to single out these experiences. It doesn't mean that you need a completely different approach in rural areas, it doesn't mean that urban homelessness is any less of an issue, it absolutely is. So these lenses just allow us to see things in more depth and richness than we otherwise would. And that's great, thank you Rory. On your website, there are some statistics about homelessness in Britain and rural homelessness. Can you share with us what some of these are? Yeah, of course. So the first thing is when you're kind of counting homelessness, it's already quite tricky to do, and it's particularly difficult in rural areas for all the reasons I've said. So any statistics we have are often an undercount and there'll be people that aren't presenting for support and aren't found. But if you look at kind of one of the definitions of homelessness, which is statutory homelessness, so that's people that are presenting to their council and they're found to have some kind of need and the council has an obligation to provide support to that individual. In that case, there were kind of 24,000 people according to the campaign to protect rural England who experienced homelessness in rural areas in 2022, '23. And that's been a significant increase compared to five years ago. If you look at rough sleeping, that's seen an increase of 24% in that year, '22, '23. So an increase on the previous year. When it comes to rough sleeping on a single night from the snapshot figures we have, you're looking at several hundred people, but we know from the other research we've done that that is a significant underestimation of the level of need in these communities. The other thing that's interesting is when you look at levels of rough sleeping, say, on what they call a per capita basis, so the proportion of people that are rough sleeping in rural areas, actually you often see areas like Bedford, Boston, North Devon, with rates of rough sleeping that are higher than Leeds or Norwich or some areas of London. So actually the proportion of people in rural areas that are rough sleeping according to these stats often is at least as high as the more urban areas. So clearly there is a real crisis here, one that's increased, but we really need a commitment to better data what you count, has an effect on what you create and what you target, which is why we're so keen to increase our approaches to better counting and better data to ensure everyone's found and that we can have a solution for everybody. Thank you. In July of this year, during Rural Housing Week, you celebrated your first anniversary as a coalition, congratulations. What are some of the successes that you've had during your first year? Thanks, and yeah, it was great to kind of have that moment. I think overall our overall success has been really putting rural homelessness in the kind of mainstream conversation around homelessness, which is something we've always wanted. We don't want it to be a kind of a niche issue or something off at the sides. We just want kind of everybody in the space to be thinking about the diversity of all of our communities when we are tackling homelessness, whether that's kind of government, whether that's the media. So I think our successes are when we've been able to bring that contribution to bear. So whether that's, you know, we've had a lot of great media coverage, kind of national news packages on some of the stories and the testimony of individuals who've experienced homelessness in rural areas, so that's been a real success. We've brought kind of our findings to conferences where we've had a lot of coverage there, too. But I think most crucially, we're really engaging with government on the issue. And through a piece of work, we did on what local authorities can do to better adopt practices that tackle rural rough sleeping. We saw lots of local authorities kind of use that to inform their homelessness strategies and to have that recognition that rural homelessness is something that should be considered not just homelessness in the more urban areas. So all of those things together have kind of had a real impact and we were really pleased and proud to be receiving an affordable housing awards for kind of campaign of the year, which we received a few months ago as a kind of recognition of this awareness raising work. But really, we want to be in a place in which we don't need to be doing this, because this conversation is just part and parcel, right? And I think we're moving towards that point, which is really welcome to say. Yeah, no, that's fantastic, well done. You mentioned just briefly there your rough sleeping guide that you've made available to local authorities across the country. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that in detail, just in case I'm sure some listeners will be interested and you might even have sort of county counselors listening in as well, who may not be aware of this. So what can you tell us about that? Definitely. So it's a piece of work that we developed with a group of people working in local government who worked in rural areas and had housing or homelessness responsibilities and with them, we developed a set of kind of best practice to explore improving rough sleeping offers in rural areas. And there are, I guess, a few themes that I'll pull out and this very much came from the local authorities as well as ourselves. The first is our approach to outreach in rural areas. So when it comes to kind of services which go out and find, identify people who are rough sleeping, in rural areas, you need to take slightly different approaches to the model. So you have to take a more kind of community referral based approach. There's an increased role for technology to kind of expand where you can reach and get into more remote areas. There's often a need to not have such high barriers to people being what they say isn't verified as rough sleeping. So often to get support, someone needs to be seen rough sleeping. It's much harder in rural areas to do that. So it requires a more flexible approach to that barrier. And then an awareness that people can get that support. There was another theme around kind of using better data. So as I mentioned, data collection in rural areas being really key and then working to use methods such as the women's rough sleeping census, which is a new approach, which means that you count homelessness by bringing together a broader range of partners who might be at the spot where people are homeless but wouldn't otherwise be counted. So whether that's like perhaps local farmer or whether that's local post office, these kind of groups that may have knowledge and expertise around what people are experiencing in the rural area, but who usually aren't involved in these conversations. It's kind of bringing those people in the conversation too. And then finally, an emphasis on sort of partnering with more urban areas to kind of learn from what they've done and to kind of share information across the boundaries of local authority areas that came through as a real theme. More integrated approaches working better with health. These are all kind of ways in which we can ensure that services are spotting when people are experiencing homelessness and making the right to ventures at the right time. And the work's been really helpful as a first step in starting to identify how we take an approach in these rural areas where to date it's been just difficult for people to kick off these conversations because there's not been a view that it's a problem that needs tackling and now that it's starting to shift. Yeah, that's great. You've also started doing a feasibility study into rural housing first. What are you hoping to achieve with the study? Yeah, so your listeners may be familiar with housing first, which is a model of support for people with experience of homelessness, which says that the most important thing is to provide housing in the first instance. That housing should be non-conditional. They shouldn't have to pass a series of tests or demonstrate a level of readiness for that housing. And it also provides really intensive support so that individual may have had very difficult traumatic experiences and provides the housing with the wraparound support. Your own roof over your head is the principal. And it's really evidence-based, but that evidence is from rural areas, sorry, from urban areas. And what we wanted to do was to explore whether the model will work in the same way in rural areas because there aren't examples of housing first being delivered at scale in rural communities. So we've been talking to people who have been trying to do this work. So an organisation in Dorset who provides some units of housing first in rural Dorset. And the results speak for themselves in terms of the fact that people have been rough sleeping for years but then come off the street and are able to live in the community that they grew up in and able to have that long-term, stable accommodation with support and not return to rough sleeping is a real testament. And we know that often people won't want to kind of be in the cities. They might not be from the city or they may in some cases be from the city but they want to kind of escape that environment which is maybe associated with trauma and harm and difficult relationships. And this is why having a model of housing which is available in rural areas as well as that but it's so important because it respects the choice of the individual, it respects the individual's kind of history and their connections to their community, all their desire for a fresh start and these things kind of come together to really underscore why a rural housing first offer could be quite transformative and that's what we were exploring in this study at the moment whether we think that's viable and if so how we get it off the ground. I was just about to ask you how would that get off the ground but used to exploring that so that's fair enough. So yeah, that's really interesting actually so I do hope to see the results of that study when it comes out so thank you for doing that. You've also got a community of practice, a rural homelessness community of practice. Can you just explain what that is and how that works? Yeah, I guess it's a bit of a technical phrase but essentially all it is is getting people in a room with a shared interests and shared expertise in facing up to the homelessness crisis in rural communities and get those people in a room and get them talking to one another which sounds incredibly simple but often it's something which we've not done in the past. Many people are working in their community to tackle their issue and they can feel quite isolated, they can feel like they don't know what other people are doing in other parts of the country, what's working for them, what's not working. So the whole idea behind this was to work with homeless link who are a membership body that represent a lot of different homeless service providers and the ferry project is one of their members and it's to get groups like the ferry project and the fantastic work that the ferry project does into contact with other providers who may be operating in rural areas but they're much earlier on in their journey and they want to learn from the things you've done having been here for 25 years, it's getting those kind of almost those mentoring relationships, that information sharing, that idea sharing and from that I think you can really start to spread great practice across the country and it's much better if that comes from someone that's done it that has the experience than if someone's just kind of telling you to do it because you should do it. So it's bringing those people together having those conversations and in a way this podcast and what you're doing with this series is a kind of form of this approach because it's shining a light on the experiences, it's increasing understanding and dialogue and as a result of hope is that people will adopt things and take actions so these connections are really key and something we've been prioritizing and the community of practice is a kind of latest initiative to encourage that work. And how would an organization or someone be able to access this community of practice? How does someone get put in touch with a group or know when people are meeting in a room to discuss these things and then be invited along? How can people get in on this? Yeah, I mean we've got a mailbox that we always welcome if people want to kind of get more involved which I'm sure we can share with yourself and listeners, we're really open if you're working in providing services or support in rural areas for people experiencing homelessness then this could be a good space and initiative to join. So we'd really welcome that and we can share those details of course because yeah there's a lot of strength in people coming together from different places and different experiences and we're kind of just at the start of this journey so we definitely welcome that. So what would the first step be? Someone going on your website and finding the contact us page or something like that? Yeah, that's right. So we've got at English Rural, if you go on the English Rural website with a page on the Rural Homelessness Coalition you'll be able to find contact details on that website. So that would be the first step and then looking to be kind of put on the mailing list for the coalition would be your first step to get more involved, to hear about what we do and then possibly join forums like the community of practice if that's something that's of interest as well. That's great, thank you. And what I'll be doing is I'll be putting a link to that page in this episode's show notes as well so that listeners who are interested can find that really easily. Just before we come to an end, Rory, what are some of your hopes for the future of the coalition in the years to come? What are some of your hopes and dreams and aspirations? So it's a funny one, but I think one of my main hopes is that we don't have to do this work anymore, I would love to be in a position where homelessness has the public recognition, the political recognition that it needs and deserves and that is part of that. There's a real deep understanding of what homelessness is and the fact that it happens everywhere across all of our communities, it doesn't just happen to one type of person, it can happen to any of us, certain people are at increased risk of it, but it really does happen everywhere and it's all of our problem to fix. So I think my hope would be that we've got, for example, we've got a new government in power at the moment, they have a commitment to a new strategy, cross-government and homelessness. We don't have any details on that yet. But if I'm being optimistic and if I'm saying what I hope to happen over the next few years, I hope we really use this as an opportunity for a reset where we have a serious strategy to end homelessness which includes building the genuinely affordable housing across the country where it's needed, including in rural communities and that that housing is affordable to people that are at risk of homelessness. Secondly, that we have the kind of investment in local authorities that we know is essential and that we have a partnership with the voluntary sector and others to harness those expertise and the goodwill of communities to address the root cause of homelessness, which is providing affordable housing, providing the kind of support services, whether that's mental health, whether that's addressing people's needs and providing skills and training. And then also our welfare system and our social security system also provides the adequate safety that people need. These are all the kind of measures that if we have them in place, then we will tackle the crisis of rural homelessness and urban alike and then there won't be a need to be doing as much campaigning and advocacy. So we're not going to turn this around overnight by any means and I don't think we're close to the point where we kind of hang up our gloves as a sector at all but my real aspiration is that that endpoint at least feels in sight where we can at least see a world that feels a little bit more visible to us where we don't need to be doing what we're doing anymore because our society values people and values the role of housing and support enough that no one is at risk of the kind of dangers and indignity of homelessness. That's fantastic. Well, Rory, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today on the Rural Homelessness Podcast. It's been fascinating getting insights into what you and the Rural Homelessness Counts Coalition are doing, so thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us. Great. Thanks. It's been great to be here. And thank you as well for listening to this episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Don't forget an episode comes out twice a month on the 1st and on the 15th. So I do hope to have the pleasure of your company again on another episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Thanks for listening. See you soon. Goodbye. Thank you for listening to the Rural Homelessness Podcast, brought to you by The Ferry Project. Visit our website on www.fairyproject.org.uk . (dramatic music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
