Our New Beginnings Fund…Why We’re Starting with Homelessness Prevention
Richard Paynter, Head of Community led Change for the Central region leading the Foundation's housing and homelessness work, explains the importance of our new fund.
At Lloyds Bank Foundation, we’re backing local organisations to help their communities have a safe, secure and affordable home. That ambition sits at the heart of our Good Place to Live programme. But when we set out to design our first fund, we faced an important question: Where can we make the greatest difference?
After months of research, conversations with experts, and a series of co-design workshops with community organisations, the answer became clear: we know that the answers lie within our communities. If we want to help more people stay in a home, we need to focus supporting local organisations to prevent homelessness before it happens.
Richard Paynter, Head of Community led Change for the Central region
Looking Beyond Crisis
Homelessness is one of the most visible signs of inequality, but by the time someone is sleeping rough or facing emergency accommodation, many opportunities to prevent that crisis have already been missed.
Much of the funding and support available today is understandably focused on responding to people who are already homeless. Those services are essential and save lives every day. But research consistently shows that far less investment reaches the organisations working earlier, helping people avoid homelessness altogether.
This reflects a growing shift in thinking across the sector. The Government's National Plan to End Homelessness argues that preventing homelessness and tackling its root causes is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. The challenge is deciding where prevention efforts can have the greatest impact.
Focusing on Life’s Turning Points
Homelessness is a complex issue with many causes. Poverty, rising housing costs, poor health, discrimination, family breakdown and a lack of affordable homes can all play a role.
Rather than trying to tackle every risk factor at once, our design process and consultations with community organisations, pointed us towards something more specific: key life turning points, or transitions.
These are pivotal moments when someone's circumstances change suddenly and dramatically. Personal networks disappear, accommodation is lost and people find themselves navigating unfamiliar systems with little stability around them. Key support relationships that would have previously sustained people during challenging times fall away. Without the right support, identified early and built for the long term, people can fall through the gaps in our overstretched safety net and land in crisis.
Throughout our hackathons and consultations with community organisations, participants repeatedly highlighted life turning points as some of the most important opportunities for prevention. As Crisis has said, "transition is the opportunity for successful prevention”.
By focusing on these moments, we are backing organisations that are already working alongside people when they need help most.
Why These Four Turning Points?
We looked at a wide range of possible areas and heard compelling arguments for many different groups of people facing increased risk of homelessness. Ultimately, we chose to focus on four pivotal life turning points where there is:
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Strong evidence of increased risk of homelessness.
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A network of specialist community organisations already delivering targeted support.
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A clear connection to community or supported housing.
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A sector size where our funding can make a meaningful contribution and where application demand remains proportionate to the number of grants available, reducing wasted effort for charities.
The four turning points are:
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Leaving prison
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Leaving care
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Securing the right to remain after seeking asylum
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Leaving an abusive relationship.
Leaving Prison
People leaving prison face some of the highest homelessness risks in the country.
Research shows that people leaving prison experience homelessness at a rate around forty times higher than the general population (6.3% vs 0.16%). The National Plan to End Homelessness identifies people being discharged from prison as being on a significant journey into rough sleeping from a public institution.
We know, for example, that there are organisations providing tailored "through-the-gate" support that helps people prepare for release, secure accommodation and rebuild their lives. These organisations are often filling critical gaps and helping people avoid a spiral into homelessness, poor health and reoffending.
Leaving Care
For many young people, leaving care should be the beginning of independent adulthood. Too often, it becomes a struggle to find safe and secure housing, and the beginning of housing instability
One-third of care leavers experience homelessness within two years of leaving care, while care-experienced young people are far more likely to face homelessness than their peers. The number of young care leavers approaching local authorities for homelessness support has continued to rise.
What makes this particularly important from a prevention perspective is that leaving care is a known transition. It provides an opportunity for organisations to work alongside young people before a housing crisis develops.
Securing Leave to Remain
For people granted refugee status, receiving leave to remain is a positive and life-changing moment. Yet it can also be the point at which the risk of homelessness increases sharply.
Once refugee status is granted, people must move on from asylum accommodation and navigate housing, benefits, employment and other systems, often within a very short timeframe of 42 days.. Evidence shows that many struggle to secure suitable accommodation before that support ends.
Community organisations play a vital role in helping people navigate these challenges and build stable foundations in their new communities.
Leaving an Abusive Relationship
No one should have to choose between staying safe and having a place to live.
Domestic abuse remains one of the leading drivers of homelessness, particularly for women. A significant proportion of women approaching local authority services at risk of being homeless are linked to domestic abuse, while research continues to show a strong relationship between experiences of abuse and rough sleeping.
Organisations supporting survivors are often helping people navigate not only trauma and recovery, but also the practical challenge of finding somewhere safe and secure to live. Their work is central to preventing homelessness before it occurs.
Building on Community Strength
A consistent theme throughout the design process was the important role played by community-led organisations.
These organisations are rooted in the places they serve. They build trust, understand local needs and often work with people long before they come into contact with homelessness services. Participants in our co-design process repeatedly called for the kind of long-term, unrestricted funding that allows organisations to respond flexibly to people's needs rather than fitting support around short-term projects.
That is why the New Beginnings Fund will back local charities and community organisations by providing unrestricted, multi-year funding, to help strengthen their work and remain resilient at a time when many charities and community organisations are facing increasing demand and financial pressure.
The Start of a Longer Journey
The New Beginnings Fund is only the first step in the wider Good Place to Live programme.
Alongside prevention, we will be exploring how to support communities, charities and community non-profit housing organisations to build, own and bring more affordable homes into use. Together, these two areas of work address both sides of the challenge: helping people avoid homelessness today while increasing the supply of safe, secure homes for the future.
Homelessness is a complex issue, and no single fund will solve it. But the evidence tells us that intervening early, supporting people through key pivotal moments of change, and backing the organisations closest to communities offers one of the strongest opportunities to create lasting impact.
That is why we are starting here, investing in prevention by backing local communities and charities. And that is why we, at Lloyds Bank Foundation, believe more people can have a good place to live.