How can we make sure the benefits system works to solve youth homelessness?

By Megan Hector, Policy Manager for YMCA England & Wales

Sometimes in life, things don’t go to plan. Your umbrella breaks during a rainstorm; your train gets cancelled; or you lose your house keys and end up locked out. At least when these things happen, you know there are people or services you can count on to help you keep going.

We would all hope that the same is true for more serious life events. If you have a health problem, or you lose your job, or your landlord evicts you from your home, our society has a safety net to ensure that you will still have somewhere to live and enough money to support yourself. But what if that safety net fails? In fact, what if that system of support actually makes it more difficult for you to recover from hardship and to get your life back on track?

YMCA provides supported accommodation to 20,000 people every year around England and Wales, many of them young people. Supported accommodation is a form of housing for people who might be at risk of, or are currently experiencing, homelessness. As well as having a safe place to stay, residents can receive help from supported accommodation staff with issues ranging from applying for benefits, getting mental health support, looking for new places to live, and getting a job.

For our recently published report Breaking Barriers to Work, we spoke to some of the young people living in our supported accommodation about their experiences of relying on the benefits system, and the effect the system has on their ability to get into work. What they told us was shocking: many young people are living in poverty, missing meals and going hungry, because benefit levels are too low. 66% of the young people who responded to our survey told us that they thought benefit levels were definitely not, or not quite, enough to live on.

Young people told us about how this worsens their physical and mental health. They described struggling with stress, anxiety and depression as a result of not having enough food to eat, or having no money for public transport. This is a terrible state of affairs in itself, but it also makes it more difficult for young people to move into work, as they find themselves in ‘survival mode’ — their focus is on accessing the basic essentials they need to live, rather than on moving into work or progressing in their lives.

For those who do manage to get a job, another hurdle is thrown in their way: the benefits system makes supported accommodation residents financially worse off if they work more than a few hours a week. This is due to the rate at which Universal Credit is reduced based on people’s earnings when they start working.

All of these problems have obvious solutions, which are explored in our report. This includes creating a Universal Credit work allowance so that supported accommodation residents can work more without losing money; and introducing an Essentials Guarantee for benefits, to ensure that benefits always provide people with enough money to live on. Now we need to convince the Government to take action.

Our report centres the voices and experiences of young people recovering from homelessness, because they’re the best people to tell us what will work to help them rebuild their lives. They have become homeless because they have fallen through the holes in our social safety net, and it’s time we listen to them in order to prevent any more young people from experiencing the same — to end youth homelessness, for good.