Complex needs in homelessness practice: a review of ‘new markets of vulnerability’

Abstract

This article reviews institutional responses to adult homeless people, to argue that there is a contemporary flourishing of debates about complex needs across homelessness research and practice fields. These understand housing need as a mental and physical health issue and a care and support need, with foundations in biographical and societal events, including trauma. Responses to complex needs are conceptualized as enterprising; fresh, proactive, preventative and positive. There are a range of legislative, policy and funding drivers for these responses, from across English homelessness, housing support and adult social care fields. At the same time, debates about what complex needs are, and how best to respond to them, are evident in international debates about homelessness models of support in the Global Western North. ‘Complex needs’ is defined as a travelling concept, which provides foundation for interventions in different locations. The article conceptualizes institutional machinations around the governance of complex needs as ‘new markets of vulnerability’. This term theorizes new markets and new marketizing strategies in the context of a larger reconfiguring of the mixed economies of welfare around market mimicking devices and practices. Intensification of activities around complex needs give insight into processes of neoliberalisation in contemporary modernized welfare ‘mixes’.

Keywords:

• Homelessness
• housing practice
• housing support
• neoliberalism
• social theory
• governance

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Dr Rachel Fyson and Professor Emeritus John Clarke for their support in the development of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This transatlantic link is especially powerful given the history of trauma as a concept originating out of the US (Leys, 1994), and the way links are drawn between adults’ formative experiences of trauma and their contemporary manifestations in complex needs across contemporary debates (Johnstone et al. 2018).

2 In conversation with Professor Emeritus John Clarke, September 2017.

3 For an example see commentary on responses to rough sleepers by charity and state partnerships (Corporate Watch, 2017).

4 Following funding from the UK Big Lottery in 2014, the coalition granted between £5 and 10 million to 12 partnerships of statutory and non-statutory providers in different areas, to target individuals with between three and four multiple needs (homelessness, reoffending, substance misuse and mental ill health). Lasting between 5 and 8 years, each partnership is founded on the idea that no person is too ‘hard to help’, and deploys a selection of intensive, positive, preventative and proactive techniques and interventions outlined in the previous section (see Adamson et al. 2015). While projects remain subject to ongoing evaluation, early findings demonstrate some success (Moreton et al. 2016). There are low rates of disengagement (given the needs of the service user group), a general movement out of ‘rough sleeping’, high levels of demand, and development of improved responses to other service user groups with multiple needs less well featured in the available data, such as for women and black and minority ethnic groups (Moreton et al., 2016).

5 Substance misuse organization Drugscope left the coalition upon its closure in 2009.

6 These developments are not without dispute. For industrial relations see Spurr, 2014b; for challenging relations between regional organizations and within non-profit sectors see Barclay, 2016, p. 25.

7 The QAF was the only nationally recognized form of regulation of hostels and sheltered housing. It was set up in 2003 to regulate providers that receive Supporting People funding on the basis of annual performance measures like health and safety, security, and protection from abuse and empowerment (Spurr, 2014a)^.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachael Dobson

Rachael Dobson is a Lecturer in Criminology, in the School of Law, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research explores institutional responses to welfare users at the level of the local-state as a way to theorise policy processes and state formations. This approach draws on poststructural, psychosocial, critical feminist and critical race informed debates about critical and cultural approaches to governance, and the role of social welfare practitioners in the ‘making-of’ policy, legislation and institutions. Rachael’s background is in homelessness practice and she continues to work with statutory and advocacy organisations delivering services to vulnerable adults, to improve outcomes through better policy knowledge and implementation.