Towards a sustainable future for supported housing: call for stories
Supported housing provides invaluable housing and support for disabled people, homeless people, people with mental health problems, people who have experienced domestic abuse and many others who need it to live independently. Yet years of funding cuts mean supported housing now faces a crisis.
The current model relies on a confusing and complicated network of funding streams, and – in the absence of ring-fenced funding – the quality, safety and viability of services are suffering. Calls to bring back a ring-fenced fund have so far proved to be unsuccessful, and the status quo risks the future of services.
With the 2027 Spending Review on the horizon, the National Housing Federation (NHF) is embarking on a significant piece of research to examine why the current system isn’t working, develop recommendations on what needs to change, and pinpoint key solutions. New Local is partnering with NHF on this project, bringing our expertise in place-based public service reform to help test a new approach to positioning supported housing within that agenda.
Why a new approach
There is growing momentum around the agenda for place-based public service reform, emerging from both national policy and innovation in local and regional systems. This is a varied agenda, building on different areas of policy and practice. Key threads include: widening and deepening devolution; creating the conditions for place partners to work collaboratively to tackle local and regional challenges; organising public services around neighbourhood footprints and nurturing community assets and infrastructure; and, experimenting with new ways to design and deliver services to better meet communities’ needs.
Embedding supported housing within this agenda will mean engaging many of the same people that place-based partners already work with — older people, care leavers, refugees, people in rehabilitation, those with long-term health conditions, veterans and more — and acting as an anchor, connecting people into wider networks of support and services in a place. Doing so is likely to require some reframing – in some instances moving away from a service specific lens to think about some of the key cohorts that supported housing works with and considering how place partners support these people to live a good life. For NHF, there are important considerations about the role it could, and is best placed to play as an organisation in testing this new approach to repositioning supported housing.
Call for stories
As part of our research, we’re keen to learn about current practice and approaches to funding, commissioning and delivering supported housing and how it can support the delivery of outcomes which enable people to live a good life as part of thriving local communities. We are therefore inviting you to share your stories, including both recently concluded and ongoing work (even in early stages).
We’d welcome contributions from supported housing providers, public sector partners with funding and commissioning responsibility for supported housing such as councils, the NHS and other key partners who have a role to play in supporting the delivery of outcomes for residents of supported housing. The voice of residents is also central to this work. We will be working with providers and other organisations to establish opportunities for direct engagement, but welcome responses as part of the call for stories which capture resident views on the value and opportunities supported housing offers and the difference it makes to people’s lives.
You can contribute by sharing relevant published or unpublished papers, reports, case studies and evaluations and/or responding to the questions in the form below.
If you would prefer to share your stories and ideas in an alternative format such as audio, or have attachments you would like to share directly with the project team please email callforevidence@newlocal.org.uk
The call for stories will close on 11th September 2026.
What’s next
Over the coming months, we’ll be hosting a series of engagement workshops with stakeholders who have an interest in funding, commissioning, and delivering a sustainable future for supported housing. We’ll be drawing on the insights gathered through the call for stories, our early research, and initial engagement to develop and test a range of hypotheses about what that future could look.
We’ll continue the project into next year, when we’ll publish a report setting out the challenge, offering a series of policy recommendations to support the future of supported housing, and making the case for a response that involves a broad coalition of people situated within the context of wider policy levers across the public sector.
Photo by David Walker | Walker Design Co. on Unsplash.
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