A Traumatised System:A critical crossroads for the commissioning in the last 10 years of homelessness services

The pandemic has clearly established homelessness as a public health issue, although sometimes the rhetoric has focused more on homeless people as a source of contagion than a group which is particularly vulnerable to it. It has demonstrated to the public that, if a policy decision can be made to take everyone off the streets, or at least the vast majority of those sleeping rough at a particular point in time, then it was a policy decision in the past and likely will be again in the future not to do so. An unplanned ‘switching off’ of pandemic measures that have reduced flows into homelessness could have drastic consequences for commissioning and homelessness systems that have been weakened by sustained experience of rapidly falling and increasingly unpredictable funding.