Table 2 Case study exploring accommodation and provision of health support inclusive of people with no recourse to public funds
‘Everyone In’ offered accommodation to people with no recourse to public funds. This practice, which was not common before due to statutory limitations, was now possible due to the broader inclusion mandate of the initiative. This allowed service providers to reach out to those people who were previously excluded from homelessness strategies: “…This cohort started to hit the street…and rough sleepers were entitled to hotel accommodation, so we took full advantage of that fact and got them in… there was people from all over the world, but there was a lot of Eastern European guys who had obviously been working in the informal economy for quite a long time, but they just had no rights, they basically had just been kicked out of wherever they were staying, literally for being symptomatic.” (SP2, London) To address challenges in providing health support to people from non-English speaking backgrounds, providers from London engaged with translators to bridge the gap in communication. One explained: “We used our telephone translation account, and we just took the number wherever we went, and we made sure our staff had work phones so that we could use telephone translation services.” (SP5, London) Other than the language barriers, certain population specific behavioural factors also had to be considered, such as the use of specific kinds of substances in different boroughs of London: “it’s interesting how homelessness in different boroughs presents in different ways. And drug use is different so like where Westminster might be all crack [cocaine] and heroin, you go to Ealing, and it’s loads of alcohol and maybe like chewing tobacco and other kinds of drugs that perhaps we don’t encounter that much in Westminster.” (SP6, London) Some regional service providers have also reported that they continue to provide support to people with no recourse to public funds and “not look further into people’s circumstances”, at the back of the ‘Everyone In’ initiative |