AN initiative aimed at supporting homeless people with multiple and complex needs to sustain their tenancies has been highly effective, with respective 12-month and 24-month tenancy sustainment rates of 84% and 82%.

According to an evaluation of the Pathfinder, at the end of June, a total of 531 people had been housed, returning figures that are commensurate with international tenancy sustainment rates, despite the programme having operated through the Covid-19 pandemic for more than a year.

The Pathfinder is aimed at scaling up Housing First delivery in five areas across Scotland, encompassing six local authorities, including Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling.

It stared in late 2018, initially in Glasgow, was formally launched in April 2019, and will run until March 2022.

The initiative is seen as a key litmus test of the opportunities and challenges involved in scaling up Housing First as it increasingly becomes the default response for homeless people with complex needs across Scotland.

Report authors – Professor Sarah Johnsen and Dr Janice Blenkinsopp – said the experiences of service user interviewees were “extremely positive” on balance, with some describing the effects on their lives as transformational.

They said the relationality, flexibility and longevity of Housing First support set it apart from other services they had used in the past, which had in their view strengthened their ability to sustain a tenancy.

This had also facilitated their willingness to engage with support, which fostered their recovery from addiction and/or poor mental health. The interim findings indicate that Housing First provision can be scaled up relatively quickly, even in areas where housing supply is constrained.

Johnsen and Blenkinsopp said: “The process has not been easy, however, with many difficulties encountered and lessons learned across all five areas. Scaling up has been especially challenging in contexts with large and/or complex systems involving many stakeholders and requiring integration or adaptation of multiple organisational procedures.

“Moreover, the nature and location of ‘sticking points’ vary depending on a range of factors (eg local housing markets, degree and nature of statutory body involvement) and tend to shift over time as services are mobilised and become more established.” They said a key challenge had been sourcing the number of suitable properties in areas where those being supported want to live.

“This issue has been especially acute in high pressure housing markets, most notably Edinburgh, and was compounded by the hiatus in property allocations during the pandemic,” they said.

“There is a shared ambition to increase the speed of property allocations going forward, not least given evidence that lengthy delays can be demoralising for some Housing First clients.

“That said, it must be acknowledged that in exercising user choice some clients actively prioritise location … or property attributes … over the likely time taken to receive a housing offer.”

They added: “Looking to the future, whilst the need to implement Housing First in slightly different ways in different local contexts is widely acknowledged, there is a strong call for the preservation of commitment to fidelity to the key principles as the approach is rolled out more widely across Scotland.”