In July 2022, the Foundation published Homelessness in Guernsey, a landmark report commissioned by charity partner Maison St Pierre.
The 100-page report was the result of an extended period of research and interviews with dozens of third-sector professionals and civil servants, many of whom deliver frontline services to people experiencing homelessness on the Island.
Findings and Recommendations
Our research findings revealed that Guernsey has a hidden homelessness problem, with waiting lists for social housing were at a 12-year high, and wages falling far behind sharply increasing housing costs.
It also found that current emergency housing is unfit for purpose and charities are struggling to deliver their core services because they are drawn into helping service users fix urgent housing-related problems.
The report highlighted the eight groups of people at highest risk of homelessness, proposed a definition of homelessness – a first for Guernsey – and called for the States to begin collecting data so it could fully understand the response to severe housing problems.
The report made 12 recommendations aiming to mitigate the harms that homelessness and severe housing problems cause locally.
Two of these recommendations the Foundation set for itself:
- To launch and coordinate a housing support forum; and
- To investigate the need for a dedicated housing charity.
We continue to work to support and implement all of the recommendations.
Foundation Actions
Establishing a homelessness charity
In February 2024, the Foundation launched At Home in Guernsey, the island’s first dedicated homelessness charity. The launch followed a year’s work investigating the need for such a charity and what it should do.
February 2023: Following a competitive tendering process, the Foundation appointed Homeless Network Scotland (HNS) to help it develop proposals for a homelessness charity.
This consultancy project, titled ‘At Home in Guernsey’, was again funded by charity partner Maison St Pierre.
May/June 2023: HNS and the Foundation ran a ‘homelessness summit’ attended by 30 representatives from charities, support agencies and States departments. HNS also interviewed people with lived experience of homelessness in Guernsey.
Among the summit attendees were members of the Housing Support Forum, a group formed by the Foundation in late 2022.
November 2023: HNS delivered their report ‘Service design to respond to homelessness and housing insecurity in Guernsey’. It recommended that a dedicated charity for supporting people facing homelessness be established, with the Foundation acting as incubator.
February 2024: The At Home in Guernsey charity launched, with Specsavers as principal sponsor. Its founders were Foundation directors Jim Roberts, Jo Cottell and Jane St Pier, and Maison St Pierre trustee James Ellis.
Summer 2024: At Home recruited its first CEO, who began the work of designing the service it will provide.
New training flats
In its 2022 report on local homelessness, the Foundation recommended the creation of additional training flats to help young people gain the skills needed to live independently.
The Foundation has worked closely with Maison St Pierre and Action for Children (AfC), which runs Guernsey’s Youth Housing Project, to identify a property suitable for new training flats.
AfC supports young tenants in preparing for independent living, increasing the chances of them successfully retaining a tenancy and decreasing their risk of homelessness in future.
The charity currently runs seven training flats for young people aged 18-25, but the Foundation’s Homelessness in Guernsey report identified a need for more. The new building will provide up to seven more training flats.
Further Change
In May 2023, the States of Guernsey published a statistic for the number of Guernsey people who are “insecurely housed”, in the 2021 edition of its annual Indicators of Poverty Report.
This is the first time such a statistic has been calculated and published, and follows the Foundation’s recommendation that the States attempt to quantify the level of homelessness locally.
In August 2023, the States published its Guernsey Housing Plan, which named the Foundation as a key partner in work to tackle homelessness locally.
The Housing Plan followed two reports from UK housing consultancy Arc4, which backed the recommendations the Foundation made in Homelessness in Guernsey, and emphasised the need for the States to gather information on the level and nature of homelessness.
