This workshop, hosted by the Centre for Homelessness Impact and the Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE), will bring together around 20 leaders from across local authorities, civil servants, homelessness and other third sector organisations to assess what we already know, identify critical gaps in our knowledge, and seek out shared research priorities for the future.

Through this work, the Centre for Homelessness Impact and CaCHE hope to enable the co-creation of a joint research agenda.

With too many people across the UK lacking a home they can call their own – and at a time when renewed efforts to end homelessness are already underway – ensuring we have the evidence we need to maximise impact is especially important.

Developing a better understanding of the challenges faced by people affected by homelessness “is key to a permanent and sustainable end to homelessness”, said Suzanne Fitzpatrick, a professor at Heriot Watt and CaCHE’s homelessness lead.

“We are bringing together change makers in the public, third and private sectors and the research community,” said Dr Ligia Teixeira, the Director of the Centre for Homelessness Impact, “to see if we can develop a programme to generate reliable and timely evidence to answer the types of questions that both local and national government need to tackle and prevent homelessness effectively.”

Workshop participants will review the findings from the Centre’s Evidence Tools and the latest evidence from the field, and then identify the most pressing evidence needs about how best to help people experiencing homelessness or at risk. By envisioning the most pressing research questions, we should seek to answer how best to improve their life chances.

The Centre for Homelessness Impact was created in response to the need for an independent voice that can focus on ensuring that policy and practice is informed by reliable evidence. Working collaboratively with others it hopes to help accelerate efforts to end homelessness. In other fields a whole movement has emerged to help find more ways to link research to policy and practice. Through the new Centre, homelessness is now catching up.

The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) is a consortium of 14 institutions led by the University of Glasgow. The centre is a multidisciplinary partnership between academia, housing policy and practice. Over the course of the five-year programme, CaCHE researchers will produce evidence and new research which will contribute to tackling the UK’s housing problems at a national, devolved, regional, and local level.

The workshop will help to identify and synchronise research priorities and shared efforts, and hopefully also the efficiency of common resources.