The Kerslake Commission was convened to examine the lessons from the COVID-19 emergency response to rough sleeping, and to understand how the significant progress made can be embedded in the long term. St Mungo’s CEO, Emma Haddad discusses the learnings of the Commission and what it means for addressing the homelessness crisis moving forward.
Since becoming the CEO of St Mungo’s in 2022, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in the Kerslake Commission. Founded by Lord Kerslake and my predecessor Steve Douglas, the Commission was a forum for learning the lessons from Everyone In, a pandemic initiative that brought inside significant numbers of people sleeping rough in record time and saved many lives. The Commission convened an advisory board of leading politicians and experts in housing, homelessness and inclusion health, and tasked them to draw out the lessons from the emergency response in collaboration with the wider sector.
Without doubt, Everyone In was one of the most impactful rough sleeping initiatives in modern history. It led to a 37% decrease in street homelessness in the year it started. Faced with this unprecedented accomplishment, achieved at a time when rough sleeping could easily have increased and the health impacts on people rough sleeping could have been devastating, the Commission sought to understand why it was so successful and to use this learning to provide a roadmap for permanently ending rough sleeping.
As the Commission has now closed, I would like to record my thanks to everyone who contributed to the Kerslake Commission and pay tribute to Lord Kerslake, without whom we could not have brought together such an esteemed group of experts or crafted such an insightful, long-sighted and powerful set of reports that we will continue to use in our drive to end homelessness and rebuild lives.
In the face of rising homelessness, we will continue to push the Government to adopt the Commission’s recommendations. We have submitted the Kerslake Commission reports to the Covid Inquiry and gave evidence at its Housing and Homelessness roundtable. We will also continue to use the learnings from the Kerslake Commission as a member of the Government’s Homelessness Expert Panel, to help shape recommendations included in the Government’s National Plan to end homelessness. Here is an overview of what the Commission achieved, provided by Liz McCulloch, who led the secretariat throughout the Commission’s four-year tenure.
Everyone In
Four years on, and with the Covid inquiry completing its evidence gathering on housing and homelessness, now is a good time to reflect on what was learnt from the Commission, what impact it had on the homelessness and rough sleeping landscape and what more needs to be done.
The Commission launched a call for evidence and invited stakeholders who were involved in the Everyone In initiative to give evidence on what worked well, what didn’t work well, the immediate challenges and opportunities, and how the good work could be embedded. In total it received 100 submissions from local authorities, health agencies, homelessness charities, housing associations and people with lived experience, who contributed their experiences and expertise through surveys, focus groups and bilateral meetings.
Lord Bob Kerslake, the chair of the Commission, concluded from this evidence,
“There are many lessons to learn from the success of the Everyone In initiative but for me, the most important one is that with the right combination of government support and collaboration across, and between, the key service providers, it is possible to end homelessness and rough sleeping. Of course, the circumstances of the pandemic were unique – there were unused rooms available in hotels that could be drawn on for example. But it demonstrated beyond doubt what is possible.”
The Learning
The Everyone In offer, that anyone at risk of rough sleeping would have access to emergency accommodation, meant that Local Authorities and frontline services were able to quickly provide shelter, at the point of need, and without having to check eligibility or verify if people were sleeping rough.
Previously non-UK nationals with limited or unclear entitlements had been treated as ineligible for housing assistance but during the pandemic they were accommodated in hotels, with support and independent immigration advice to resolve their status. This led to an improvement in knowledge, engagement and outcomes for this group, with the crucial learning being that it is easier and more efficient to progress someone’s immigration status and explore their options when they are indoors and can then sleep safely and are provided with trauma informed support.
The central Government directive, and funding to match, helped galvanise local agencies with the common objective of saving lives. This led to greater strategic buy in, liberating many from process driven silo structures. An increased sense of shared responsibility and impetus to act meant that agencies took responsibility for clients beyond their remit, with fewer services gatekeeping in order to protect oversubscribed caseloads.
Many who had previously refused offers of support and accommodation were successfully brought in and persuaded to engage with services, in some cases for the first time.
Treating rough sleeping as a public health issue, rather than just a housing issue, also meant the response saw a substantial and increased engagement from the health sector in rough sleeping. It presented a unique opportunity to work with people who suffered significant vulnerabilities and allowed health services to work with them closely and in a sustained manner.
Universal homelessness prevention measures were key part of the pandemic response as they stemmed the flow of people onto the streets, with the evictions moratorium, £20 uplift in Universal Credit and restoration of Local Housing Allowance rates cited as having the most impact.
The Commission did, however, identify that the prioritisation of outreach meant that some areas struggled to deliver sufficient in-person, trauma informed, support services to help people manage this period of social isolation; this resulted in more in anti-social behaviour and abandonments than areas where this support was provided. The generic approach of the response also meant that services were geared to meet the needs of people who were in the largest cohorts – primarily adult men.
Moreover, though Local Authorities tried to continue an ‘in for good’ principle, there were fewer move on options for people with very high support needs and those with who do not have access to benefits due to their immigration status.
Providers and Local Authorities also found the constant bidding for different short term funding pots, and the multiple and lengthy monitoring requirements attached to them, were resource intensive and prevented strategic service delivery. In total, 13 different government funding pots were allocated to rough sleeping in the first year of the pandemic.
In summary, the learnings from Everyone In were that a successful homelessness response can be defined as low threshold, trauma-informed joined up services that work to meet people’s needs when they’re inside accommodation, and sufficient investment in universal prevention measures that stem the flow onto the streets. Crucial for achieving this is a sufficient supply of appropriate housing, suitable for a range of needs.
The Reports
The Kerslake Commission recorded the lessons learned and produced two well researched and evidence led reports in its first year, an interim report that looked back on the lessons learnt from Everyone In and a final report that applied these lessons to craft a blueprint for ending rough sleeping.
The Commission urged the Government to allocate three-year funding settlements for homelessness and rough sleeping at the 2021 Spending Review to support strategic delivery and improve value for money. It also recommended that the Government increase the supply of supported housing by continuing investment in the Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme for the duration of the Spending Review and creating more bespoke provision for women and young people.
The Commission identified that a new rough sleeping strategy was needed to build on the new ways of working developed during Everyone In, setting out clear expectations and strategic engagement with key agencies, and an increased focus on prevention. It also saw a need for an Inter-Ministerial Group on rough sleeping to oversee the delivery of the strategy and to effectively coordinate a cross departmental approach.
The Commission recommended that the Government should establish a clear policy position that limiting access to benefits for non-UK nationals should stop short of causing destitution and that local authorities should be provided with guidance on what it means to ‘exhaust all options’ within the law when supporting this group.
It also recommended that the forthcoming integrated care systems should have a dedicated focus on tackling health inequalities for inclusion health populations, which include people experiencing homelessness and rough sleeping, to ensure that both mainstream and inclusion health services deliver trauma informed services for this cohort.
The Commission also advocated for universal homelessness prevention measures – keeping Local Housing Allowance Rates at the 30th percentile of local rents, retaining the £20 uplift in Universal Credit and ramping up delivery of new social rented homes.
The Commission continued beyond its first year to hold the Government to account on its recommendations, producing two further reports that tracked progress, the challenges and risks around homelessness and rough sleeping, and the short and long-term priorities.
Issues which have become acute in the years since Everyone In, and which have driven recent increases in homelessness, have been the housing affordability crisis and an increase in newly granted refugees being discharged from Home Office accommodation into homelessness. In its reports, the Commission articulated that urgent action was needed to restore Local Housing Allowance rates to the 30th percentile, which had been frozen since April 2020, and that the move on period for newly granted refugees should be increased from 28 to 56 days.
The Commission also advised on the priorities of the next administration, making the case in its reports that significant investment in social housing and housing-based support was needed to move towards a preventative approach. The report itself was promoted online by the former shadow deputy prime minister Angela Raynor.
The results
In the lead up to the 2021 Spending Review, the Commission submitted its evidence to the former Minister for Rough Sleeping (Eddie Hughes), who used this to make a convincing case to Government that the homelessness sector needed a longer-term funding settlement. The allocation of a three-year Rough Sleeping Initiative funding settlement marked a departure from annual rounds of funding that had taken place since 2018.
This call to action for a new rough sleeping strategy was also taken up, with the previous Government publishing a refreshed strategy in 2022 that put a greater focus on rough sleeping prevention and published it as a cross-departmental strategy.
The strategy provided new capital and revenue funding to continue the Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme for the duration of the spending review, renamed as the Single Homelessness Accommodation Programme. This delivered much needed supported housing for people with higher levels of support need and young people.
The strategy sought to develop an ‘exhaust all options’ approach for non-UK nationals who are rough sleeping, which cemented a presumption of providing support for people with restricted eligibility due to their immigration status. New common practices have now emerged that have seen local authorities commission immigration advice beds for people with unclear and limited entitlements, so that their status can be resolved within accommodation, though further work is needed to prevent destitution among people with limited and unclear entitlements.
The strategy also set out an ambition to ensure that the new Integrated Care Systems took account of the health and social care needs of people sleeping rough in their area, a crucial learning from the pandemic. Overall, this ambition has failed to materialise in the face of competing pressures in the NHS, and more work is needed to ensure that inclusion health groups are being prioritised given they face the most severe public health inequalities.
The Commission used its annual reports on homelessness to continue to influence the previous Government, eventually securing the restoration of the Local Housing Allowance rates to the 30th percentile at the 2023 Autumn Statement, ending a four-year freeze on housing benefit.
In December 2025, the current Government published an updated strategy titled: A National Plan to End Homelessness. This included a new ‘duty to collaborate’; to address the needless homelessness that we see from people leaving hospitals, prisons and asylum accommodation through joining up how government agencies work together.
Following the Commission’s call for urgent action on asylum accommodation, the decision in the Home Office in 2024 to run a pilot increasing the move on period for newly granted refugees to 56 days, this was a very positive step, but unfortunately the decision was reverted in late 2025 with the 56 day pilot ending on 31 January 2026
The Government’s decision to establish an Inter-Ministerial Group on homelessness, chaired by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, is a welcome development that will drive progress across Government to tackle the root causes. The announcement last year that the Government is implementing the biggest cash injection to social and affordable housing in 50 years is progress but the commitment to build 180,000 social rented homes over a decade falls short of the Commission’s recommended goal of building 900,000 homes over this period. Further investment is also needed in supported housing and housing-based support, so that people have the support they need to maintain a tenancy and prevent a fall into homelessness.
In terms of policy, huge steps were made in the repealing of the Vagrancy Act (1842) which criminalised rough sleeping, and the finalising of the long-awaited Renters Reform Act – coming into effect in 2026 – which will end Section 21 no fault evictions.
More needs to be done to address the once again rising tide of homelessness, with the Commission calling for collaboration across government, with sustainable and joined up funding programmes which are outcome led and facilitate partnership working across the sector.
The lasting impact
What made the Commission impactful was its ability to bring together cross-sector partners to have a coherent voice on the changes needed to tackle homelessness. We would not have been able to do this work without our advisory board members and the wider voluntary sector who generously contributed their expertise to its work. Our thanks also go to ministers and officials at MHCLG who actively engaged in the Commission.
But most of all, we could not have done the Commission without the vision and leadership of Lord Kerslake and Steve Douglas. They were both inspiring, compassionate and tenacious individuals who leave behind a legacy of change and we have immense gratitude for their contributions.
Though the Everyone In initiative took place in a unique time in history, its lessons and principles remain evergreen. The Commission has given us a road map to end homelessness and rough sleeping and in many ways the work has only just begun, though the challenges are not insurmountable. What Everyone In showed us is that where there’s the will, we can end homelessness for good.
Moving into 2026, the New Economics Foundation, St Mungo’s and the Peabody Trust have established a two-year Kerslake Research Fellowship, to continue the essential work of improving outcomes in homelessness, housing and social housing, developing policy for secure, genuinely affordable, and high-quality homes.
The legacy of the Kerslake Commission on Rough Sleeping and Homelessness is an evidenced road map to ending rough sleeping, and the work that will continue to develop solutions which will make this a reality.
Cllr Louise Gittins, Chair of the LGA said: “The commission should be proud of the work it has done to address a hugely complex and important area. Looking at homelessness, its drivers, and solutions, in the broader context of the Covid-19 pandemic, was a major feat. Many of the original commitments that have been taken forward and achieved since its foundation are vital work for those experiencing homelessness, and the remaining recommendations are needed now more than ever in the face of increasing demand and stretched resources. The learning from the commission should form a valuable evidence base for the upcoming cross-departmental homelessness strategy.
“Under the stewardship of Lord Bob Kerslake, who demonstrated a huge commitment to public service, this commission’s dedication and focus brought real progress and improvement for people, communities and local government alike.”
Alistair Smyth, Director of Policy and Research at the NHF, said: “‘Everyone In’ showed what can be achieved with political will, the right resources, and a commitment to working in partnership to provide safe, secure homes and support for people experiencing homelessness. The Kerslake Commission rightly recognised the power of this collaborative approach during the pandemic and the need for this work to continue. Successful partnership working between housing associations, local authorities and health services, alongside further investment for wider homelessness prevention, is vital in ending homelessness and ensuring everyone has a safe place to call home. We look forward to the publication of the Government’s homelessness strategy later this year which can build on the work of the Commission by setting out a long-term approach to preventing and reducing homelessness.”
