Homelessness Services in Europe
Comparative Studies on Homelessness 8
About the Research
The aim of this research was to explore the range of homelessness service provision across Europe. There were two main objectives, the first was to look at how homelessness service provision varied between different countries and the second was to explore patterns of homelessness service provision in cities, larger towns and rural areas. A broad goal was to explore the extent to which it might be possible to start to construct a typology of the range of homelessness services in Europe, recognising the challenges of trying to accommodate intensive, highly resourced services alongside basic services that struggle to find sufficient funding within a single taxonomy.
This comparative research drew on a standardised questionnaire to experts in sixteen member states of the European Union. Northern Europe was represented by Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden and the UK. Central and Eastern Europe by Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia and Southern Europe by Italy, Portugal and Spain. This is the eighth in a series of research reports that has sent a standardised questionnaire to experts in a range of EU member states. Experts had to complete the questionnaire themselves but were encouraged to form teams and/or make any connections they required where this was necessary to secure the required information. This comparative research took a broad approach, looking at trends and differences at a broad scale, it was not an attempt to fully explore or reflect upon the detail of often very complex and nuanced differences that can exist between countries, or indeed different places within the same country.
This report begins by describing the methods used for the research and outlining the key questions that the research sought to answer. Chapter 3 provides a broad description of homelessness services in Europe and presents a possible typology of service provision for consideration. This chapter looks in turn at emergency accommodation and temporary accommodation before moving on to look at two forms of non-residential homelessness services. The first group covers nonhousing support, e.g. daycentres, outreach, food distribution and medical services, and the second group covers housing-focused support services, which centre on providing and sustaining housing, e.g. housing-led and Housing First services. This chapter concludes with a review of information collected on homelessness prevention in Europe.
Chapter 4 explores the legal regulation of homelessness services, which influences the range, extent and consistency of service provision in different countries. This chapter also briefly discusses how earlier research has shown how welfare conditionality and local connection rules, governing entire populations, can influence access to homelessness services and routes out of homelessness. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 all take the same format and look respectively at the patterns of homelessness service provision in larger cities, medium sized cities/towns and finally in rural areas. The discussion in Chapter 8 brings together the main findings and revisits the proposed typology of homelessness services in Europe.