Losing and Finding a Home: homelessness, multiple exclusion and everyday lives

In 2009 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) launched a co-funded programme of research into ‘Multiple Exclusion Homelessness’. The aim of the programme was to help inform national and local policy and practice when tackling homelessness across the United Kingdom (UK). The development of a new term ‘multiple exclusion homelessness’ was purposeful in order to explore the lives of those people in society who are among the most vulnerable. Rather than creating a new layer of the homeless population, the ‘multiple exclusion’ focus aimed to bring into view the complex interplay of issues such as: worklessness, poverty, severe mental health problems, drug and alcohol dependencies, state care, the criminal justice system and so on. Furthermore, it was of central interest to the programme to explore how coping and survival strategies were played out; for example, sex work, begging, criminality, street drinking and drug-dealing, and what connection, if any, these activities had to the prevalence and experience of homelessness.

As part of this programme researchers at the Universities of Salford and Lincoln, along with the support of an advisory group, were commissioned to undertake a two-year study focused on understanding the lives of people with experience of homelessness and/or multiple exclusion, in whatever form that took, within the city of Stoke-on-Trent.

The starting point for our research was to transcend an analysis of homelessness that focuses upon housing supply, demand and costs in order to explore the role of factors such as family history, poverty and the breakdown of social relationships. The research aimed to look at how such factors featured within people’s lives, and particularly how they related to individuals’ experience of homelessness.