Homelessness internal reviews and appeals

A short post to say that, having thought about this quite a bit since I posted on housing justice, I am planning to delve a little deeper in to homelessness reviews and county court appeals.  We know about decision-making statistics.  These tell us the numbers of “successful” and “unsuccessful” applications on each of the legislative criteria, as well as prevention and relief.  What they don’t tell us, and I don’t think records are kept, is how many requests for a review are made, and how many of those requests are successful; and how many of those unsuccessful reviews proceed to county court appeal.  These are pretty important questions about the administration of homelessness law.  With other colleagues, I was involved in a range of projects between around 1996-2015 on these questions.  We ran out of steam a bit towards the end, perhaps, and others (such as Sarah Nason) have done important work in this area, specifically in Wales.

But, it would be helpful to get an idea of the extent of the problem.  For example, in 2024-5, the stats tell us that 372 applicants were found to be not eligible; 4,863 eligible but not homeless or threatened with homelessness; 240 not in priority need; and 87 intentionally homeless.  There are a range of other matters, eg suitability and interim accommodation, which can be the subject of a request for internal review.

It would be helpful to know what is going on for all sorts of reasons.

My plan is to conduct questionnaire research of Welsh local authorities – to be sent to managers of the homelessness service in early 2026 – on the use of the internal review and county court appeals processes.  And how they manage them as well as what they think of them.  I have an application for ethical approval to conduct that work under consideration.  I am sure that I could do this work by FoIing local authorities but think that this is a better way of obtaining better data on these questions (especially what they think of it all).

If you are a local authority homelessness service manager, please look out for my email in the New Year (assuming I get ethical approval).