The publication of the National Plan to End Homelessness marks a significant moment for housing and homelessness policy in England. It is the first comprehensive, cross-government strategy for several years, arriving at a time when homelessness in all its forms, from rough sleeping to temporary accommodation and sofa surfing, has reached record levels.
The plan sets out substantial investment, renewed focus on prevention, and a stronger framework for standards and accountability across the system. These are welcome and necessary steps. But for organisations working directly with young people at risk of homelessness, and for those of us working at the interface between policy, practice and public debate, the most important question is not whether the system improves at each individual point, but whether it works as a whole.
For young people, homelessness is rarely a single event. It is more often the result of a series of transitions that do not quite join up, such as leaving care, moving on from supported accommodation, or taking on adult housing costs without adult levels of security. This is where the success or failure of the new plan will ultimately be felt.
The National Plan to End Homelessness is a 60-page strategy that brings together commitments from across government to address homelessness in England. Backed by £3.5 billion of investment over the next three years, it aims to make homelessness rarer, briefer and non-recurring.
For the first time, the strategy explicitly encompasses all forms of homelessness, including rough sleeping, temporary accommodation and hidden homelessness such as sofa surfing. It places a strong emphasis on prevention, recognising that homelessness is often the outcome of wider pressures in housing, health, justice and social care systems rather than a failure of individuals.
Key commitments include increased funding for local authorities, a renewed focus on early intervention, measures to improve standards in temporary accommodation, and proposals to strengthen the supported housing sector. The plan also signals a shift towards greater cross-government accountability, with new expectations for public services to work together to prevent people from falling into homelessness at key transition points.
Taken together, these measures represent a clear attempt to move beyond short-term responses and address the structural drivers of homelessness. They also reflect lessons learned over time, particularly the need for coordination, clarity of responsibility and sustained investment.
Prevention sits at the heart of the new strategy. Alongside long-term ambitions to reduce homelessness overall, the government has committed £842 million per year to crisis and resilience funding, intended to help local authorities intervene earlier and support people before they reach crisis point.
The plan recognises that homelessness often occurs at moments of change – leaving care, being discharged from hospital, or exiting the criminal justice system – and that better coordination between services is essential to prevent people being left without a safe place to live. This is an important and overdue acknowledgement.
However, prevention cannot end with keeping someone off the street today. For young people in particular, prevention must also mean creating realistic routes into independence tomorrow.
When support works well, young people develop the skills, confidence and stability they need to live independently. But if there are no affordable homes to move on to, or if the step into independence is financially unviable, that progress stalls. Young people remain stuck in the system longer than intended, supported accommodation becomes congested, and pressure builds elsewhere – often in temporary or emergency housing.
This is not a failure of support services. It is a system-level problem that the National Plan to End Homelessness must address if its prevention ambitions are to translate into lasting change for young people.
Supported accommodation features more explicitly in the National Plan than in recent national homelessness policy, and that matters for young people.
There is useful historical context here. In the early 2000s, the Supporting People programme provided a national framework for housing-related support, backed by significant, ringfenced investment and clear local authority responsibility for commissioning and oversight. While not without its flaws, Supporting People helped to stabilise supported accommodation, drive up standards and reduce the influence of poor-quality provision. For young people who cannot move straight into independent housing, supported accommodation provides stability, safety and the opportunity to develop the skills needed to live independently.
The strategy explicitly acknowledges that supported housing is essential for people with higher or more complex needs, and that provision has shrunk over time as funding arrangements changed, reliance on short-term funding cycles increased, and regulatory uncertainty persisted. That recognition is important, not least because supported accommodation has too often been treated as a temporary add-on rather than as core housing infrastructure.
The plan commits £124 million over three years, from 2026 to 2029, to increase the supply of supported housing in targeted local areas. This funding is intended to support more than 2,500 people and includes scope for new developments delivered through the Social and Affordable Homes Programme.
While this level of investment does not return the sector to the scale or stability it once had, it does represent a clear signal that supported accommodation is part of the long-term solution to homelessness, not just a crisis response. For providers, commissioners and communities alike, that signal matters.
Alongside investment, the strategy sets out plans to strengthen regulation of supported housing through a new licensing regime, building on the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023. Local authorities will be required to develop supported housing strategies and license provision in their areas, with a new national advisory panel providing oversight and guidance.
This regulatory approach is distinct from Ofsted, which focuses primarily on children’s services. The proposed licensing regime is designed to address quality and standards across supported housing more broadly, including accommodation for adults and young people over 18, and to tackle rogue providers whose poor practice undermines trust in the sector.
The intention is clear: to protect residents, improve consistency, and ensure that public investment supports provision that genuinely meets people’s needs.
Investment and regulation are necessary and welcome. But they do not, on their own, resolve the fundamental challenge facing young people who are ready to move on. If the system makes independence financially and practically harder than remaining in supported accommodation, then strengthened provision risks becoming static rather than transitional.
This is not a criticism of supported housing. It is a reminder that its success depends on what comes next in a young person’s journey. Without viable move-on options, even the best-supported pathways can stall, and the wider system begins to strain.
One of the most significant, and least discussed, elements of the National Plan is the proposed new duty to collaborate. The government has committed to consulting on a statutory requirement for key public services to work together to prevent homelessness, particularly at points where people are most at risk of falling through the gaps.
This reflects a growing recognition that homelessness is often created not by a single failure, but by fractured handovers between systems. Leaving care, being discharged from hospital, exiting prison or moving out of asylum accommodation are all moments when responsibility can become blurred, and when the consequences of poor coordination are felt most sharply.
The plan explicitly links the duty to collaborate to these transition points, setting out ambitions to reduce the number of people who become homeless after leaving public institutions. This includes a long-term commitment that no young person leaving care should experience homelessness, and a focus on preventing discharge from hospital or custody into homelessness.
This ambition is significant. But it also underlines the scale of the challenge. Evidence consistently shows that a substantial proportion of care leavers continue to experience homelessness or serious housing instability after leaving care. Bridging that gap will require more than coordination and intent. It will require practical mechanisms that recognise the financial and developmental realities young people face as they move into adulthood.
Collaboration itself is not new. Local authorities, health services, children’s services and voluntary organisations already work together in many areas. The challenge has been less about willingness and more about accountability. When systems are under pressure, it is often unclear who is responsible for ensuring that a housing pathway is in place, particularly for young people whose needs cut across multiple services.
If implemented well, a statutory duty to collaborate has the potential to shift this dynamic. By clarifying expectations and responsibilities, it could help ensure that prevention is not treated as the responsibility of housing services alone, but as a shared obligation across public systems.
For young people, this matters deeply. Transitions into adulthood already involve significant change. When those transitions are compounded by fragmented systems and unclear accountability, the risk of homelessness increases. A duty to collaborate will only be meaningful if it results in earlier planning, clearer pathways and shared ownership of outcomes, rather than simply adding another layer of process.
Ultimately, collaboration must be judged by what it enables in practice. If it helps young people move smoothly from one stage of support to the next, with housing options that are realistic and sustainable, it will represent a genuine step forward. If not, the same gaps will continue to open at the points where the system should be strongest.
For young people, the point at which the homelessness system most often falters is not at the moment of crisis, but at the moment of progress. Supported accommodation is designed to be transitional, a stepping stone towards independence rather than an end point in itself. When it works well, young people are ready to move on.
Too often, however, that readiness is met with a lack of viable options. In many areas, the cost of private rented housing far outstrips the financial support available to young people, particularly those under 35 who are subject to the shared accommodation rate of Local Housing Allowance. Even where a tenancy exists in theory, upfront costs, guarantor requirements and risk-averse landlord practices can put it out of reach in practice.
The result is a growing bottleneck. Young people remain in supported accommodation longer than intended, not because they need ongoing support, but because independence has become structurally harder to achieve. This places pressure on services, limits access for those in urgent need, and increases reliance on temporary or emergency accommodation elsewhere in the system.
This is where the ambitions of the National Plan meet their hardest test. Investment in support, stronger regulation and better collaboration all assume that there is somewhere to move on to. Without addressing the affordability and accessibility of housing for young people, the system risks improving the quality of support while leaving the underlying blockage untouched.
Moving on is not simply about the availability of housing. It is about whether the system makes independence a realistic and sustainable option. When independence is financially penalised, prevention efforts can stall at the point where they should succeed.
Addressing move-on is therefore not a marginal issue. It is central to whether the National Plan can deliver lasting change, particularly for young people whose pathways into adulthood are already shaped by instability and reduced safety nets.
One of the assumptions that continues to shape housing and welfare policy is that turning 18 marks a clean transition into independence. In reality, for many young people, this transition brings adult responsibilities without adult levels of security or affordability.
At 18, young people are expected to navigate a housing market that is increasingly expensive and competitive. Rents do not reduce because someone is young, but the financial support available to them often does.
For many young people under 35, access to housing support in the private rented sector is limited to the shared accommodation rate of Local Housing Allowance, regardless of whether shared housing is appropriate, available or safe. Care leavers are an important exception: they are entitled to the one-bedroom rate of Local Housing Allowance up to the age of 25. However, this does not remove the affordability challenge.
Local Housing Allowance rates were frozen for several years and, although they were partially reset in 2024, they still fail to reflect real market rents in many areas. Even where LHA is theoretically available, it often falls well short of the cost of a suitable home. This gap is particularly acute in areas with high private rents, where young people face limited choice and increased risk of instability. Care leavers under 25 receive a lower standard allowance of Universal Credit than those aged 25 and over. As a result, when Local Housing Allowance falls short of actual rent, as it does in the vast majority of local areas, young people are forced to cover the gap from an already reduced income, leaving little room to absorb rising living costs or unexpected expenses.
This creates a structural mismatch between policy expectations and lived reality.
Concerns about this gap are widely shared across the sector. Organisations including the Shelter and Crisis have repeatedly warned that when housing support fails to keep pace with rents, young people and others on low incomes are effectively locked out of the private rented sector, regardless of preparation or support. Sector analysis, including recent commentary from Inside Housing, has highlighted the knock-on effect this has on move-on from supported accommodation and the wider homelessness system. Young people leaving supported accommodation may be ready to live independently, but are often pushed towards shared housing options that are unstable, unaffordable or unsuitable. Others face upfront costs, guarantor requirements and landlord barriers that make private renting inaccessible altogether.
At Step by Step, we describe this challenge simply as 18 isn’t cheaper. It reflects the reality that independence does not come with reduced costs, only reduced support. Without recognising this gap, policies designed to promote independence risk setting young people up to struggle rather than succeed.
The National Plan to End Homelessness rightly places emphasis on prevention, support and standards, and includes a long-term ambition that no young person leaving care should experience homelessness. However, it makes no specific provision to smooth the financial cliff edge young people face when moving from children’s services to adult systems, and is largely silent on the affordability gap facing young people in the private rented sector, including the ongoing misalignment between Local Housing Allowance and real rents. Making independence achievable requires more than preparation and support. It requires a system that does not penalise young people financially at the point they are expected to stand on their own.
Recognising that 18 is not cheaper is not about lowering expectations for young people. It is about aligning policy with reality, so that when young people are ready to move forward, the system is ready to move with them.
The National Plan to End Homelessness represents a serious attempt to reset homelessness policy in England. Its emphasis on prevention, supported accommodation, standards and collaboration reflects lessons learned over time and a recognition that homelessness cannot be solved by housing services alone.
But ambition and intent are only the starting point. The real test of the plan will be whether it enables young people to move forward through the system, not just be supported within it. That means ensuring that pathways out of supported accommodation are viable, that transitions between services are planned and accountable, and that independence is not financially penalised at the point it is expected.
For young people, the risk of homelessness is shaped less by a single moment of crisis than by how systems respond at moments of change. Leaving care, moving from children’s to adult services, or stepping into independent housing are all points where the gap between policy ambition and lived reality can widen.
If the National Plan is to deliver lasting change, it must be judged by what happens at these transition points. Prevention will only succeed if success has somewhere to go. Supported accommodation will only fulfil its purpose if independence is achievable. Collaboration will only matter if it results in shared responsibility for outcomes.
Getting this right is not just about reducing homelessness statistics. It is about whether young people are given a fair chance to build stable, independent lives over the long term. The National Plan sets an important direction. Turning that direction into durable change will depend on whether the system is designed to move with young people, rather than expecting them to navigate its gaps alone.
This Christmas, while many of us gather in warmth and comfort, young people across our communities are facing challenges no one their age should have to.
By donating to our Take a Stand This Christmas appeal, you can be a guiding star in a young person’s journey.
