On 27th January 2025, CHAD and the Faculty of Public Health hosted this webinar with Bruno Ornelas, Rough Sleeping Advisor at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), and Andy Meakin, Director of Expert Citizens Community Interest Company and Freelance Consultant.
Bruno Ornelas began by giving an overview of rough sleeping statistics. He highlighted that rough sleeping has doubled since 2020 and that 33% tend to be new to the street. The focus for the rest of the webinar was on the 34% of rough sleepers that have been on the streets longer-term. Bruno stated that “this is not just a housing issue but complicating factors such as individual and structural support making it difficult to move into accommodation and stay”. In light of this complexity, the need for multi-agency working was emphasised.
This leads to Andy Meakin who gave an overview of the ‘Multiple Exclusion Homelessness: A Safeguarding Toolkit for Practitioners’. The toolkit is an aid to fact finding and decision-making for practitioners when there are safeguarding concerns about a person experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness. Through using the toolkit, practitioners can record their concerns and other information, which helps them to navigate uncertainty and complexity. It also helps communication across multi-disciplinary teams.
Andy emphasised that the toolkit does not replace local systems or forms – where a practitioner already has “reasonable cause to suspect”, then they should not delay in making a safeguarding referral through their local process. In these instances, the toolkit can still be used to record their observations. Where there is uncertainty, the practitioner can use the toolkit to collate and analyse information to help make the decision about whether a safeguarding referral should be triggered.
Andy talked through the structure of the toolkit, giving examples of questions asked such as; has the individual got somewhere safe to stay tonight? Do they understand why there is a concern for their wellbeing?
The webinar ended with a list of considerations for multiagency workers and options to download the toolkit from several links. For the updated version of the toolkit, please visit: https://expertcitizens.org.uk/documents-pdf/ .
You can download the speakers’ slides on the Multiple Exclusion Homelessness Toolkit here.
Please see the last slide for a list of useful resources and links.
