No homelessness in Norfolk: Norwich City Council

Norwich City Council, bidding on behalf of all Norfolk local authorities, was awarded £20,000 to support the Norfolk Strategic Housing Partnership (NSHP) No Homelessness in Norfolk project. 

The Norfolk Strategic Housing Partnership is a cross-sector collaboration of senior leaders from all Norfolk local authorities, the police, probation, health, registered housing providers and voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations. 

Collaboration is key to the NSHP. We believe that collaboration should not be limited to those who already hold power, but that true positive change only comes by incorporating the expertise of experts by experience (people who have lived experience of homelessness). However, we needed support to develop a system wide approach to co-production that built on existing good practice.  

Groundswell works with people with experience of homelessness, offering opportunities to create solution to homelessness. The NSHP commissioned Groundswell to provide expert training and consultation to partners, which included specific local and county-wide insights, generated at five Speakout! events involving over 100 people, all interested in ending homelessness in Norfolk.  

Ideas generated at the Speakout! events were creative and wide ranging, from sharing meals with people as a way of getting service feedback, to including experts by experience in the analysis of local data. These have been shared with partners and local stakeholders in the form of five Local Action Plans and a new Co-production Working Group is being set up to bring together expertise and provide a forum for developing and sharing best practice across Norfolk.  

Norfolk is a large county with coastal, urban and rural areas. Each of its local authority areas has individual challenges, diverse homelessness populations and different levels of service provision. 

When it comes to involving people impacted by homelessness, we need to make sure we are hearing the diverse experiences of people that exist across the county, and involving people in the decisions that impact them.  

In terms of this project, some of the challenges included the limitations on time and resource. We wanted sessions to be in person but were only able to deliver five training sessions and five Speakout! sessions, rather than one per district area. We also had no budget for hiring spaces, relying on the generosity of partners to provide these spaces.  

We were reliant on partner organisations providing support to people with lived experience to attend sessions: we saw the highest engagement in areas with support services that already involved people in their work. 

Although we were offering incentives to people with lived experience to attend sessions in the form of a voucher, we were not able to support with travel costs. This impacted on the range of people who were able to attend.  

To maximise engagement, we held the in person sessions in central locations where there was also a concentration of services. As the sessions were mostly in more urban environments, districts with more rural populations and fewer services saw fewer people with lived experience attending.  

An unexpected challenge was that in one area the majority of the homeless population work full time, taking part in seasonal agricultural and factory work, which meant that even with incentives for attending, we were unable to speak to people with lived experience in that area.  

From May to December 2022, we worked with Groundswell to: 

Groundswell also attended strategic and operational partnership meetings.

The training inspired colleagues to try things out in their own places of work and gave them confidence to take a 'test and learn' approach to co-production. The feedback from these sessions was overwhelmingly positive. Groundswell have also shared extensive resources with partners to support continued learning.  

The Speakout! sessions improved knowledge of local homelessness challenges and brought to light challenges that were shared across the county that will feed into the Norfolk Homelessness Prevention Strategy.  

We built relationships with citizens and people impacted by homelessness. The Speakout! events demonstrated the extent to which people want to prevent and alleviate homelessness and started a dialogue between individuals and services that will be continued beyond this project.  

We have tangible, deliverable actions that we can focus on in the next year to further develop our collective approach to co-production.  

Stakeholders at every level, from system leaders and decision makers to front facing colleagues and experts by experience participated in this process. We were brought together to focus on how we can involve people with lived experience in the solutions to homelessness, supporting improved collaboration across the system.  

The NSHP is setting up a Working Group to focus on embedding the learning and delivering the recommended actions that came out of this project. This will be made up of colleagues from across the housing system, including service providers, local authorities, housing associations, health, police and probation colleagues.  

This group will seek to join-up existing work and prevent duplication, e.g., we are working with Rethink who have been commissioned locally to coproduce elements of community mental health services, many of the individuals they work with will also have experienced housing insecurity and potentially homelessness, so we will seek to co-deliver sessions.  

Sophie Sadler

No Homelessness in Norfolk Project Manager 

[email protected]