Programme Lead Mike Hughes reflects on the last 12 months and takes a look forward to what's coming up this year.
Looking back at 2024, it is great to have time to reflect on our collective achievements.

For me, the things that really have a profound impact are the collaborative approaches we have across our partners, stakeholders and housing providers which has enabled us to find homes for another 57 people this year.
We now have 161 people who have been in their homes for over two years, of which 137 are over three years. Last year, our Housing Partners offered 75 properties to the programme, and we are incredible grateful for all the housing teams we have worked with and for their support of the people we are aiming to house.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham's ‘Housing First region approach’ acknowledges that everything starts with a safe, suitable, and stable home and from this foundation people can ‘Live Well’ and have the opportunities to live the life they want to.
This is now the policy being pursued by Andy and the Combined Authority and it has very much been informed by the work that we have done on the Housing First programme with our housing partners.
In a further indicator of the success of the program we now have 31 people (approximately 10 per cent of current caseloads) in step down or person-initiated contact, this is where they are safely trialling a lower level of support to see if they are comfortable and this is a precursor to some of them transitioning away from the programme as they feel they no longer need our support.
It seems implausible that this financial year is our sixth year, it feels like only yesterday we were awarded the pilot contract and were looking at the epic scale of the challenge ahead of us. Now we are scaling up to tender for a new contract to take the programme beyond 2025.
We are expecting the next contract to be a four-year settlement which will see the Housing First intervention in Greater Manchester run till March 2029. This exciting development means that we can assure the people that we support and all the stakeholders and Housing Partners that we are here to support them for the long term, and we can look forward to continuing to accrue the benefits for those we support.
We should feel proud of these achievement and at the same time use those successes to push for more interventions and continuously try to do more with the assets we have, as part of our pre-tender we have reviewed the impact of the program looking for areas where we can effect more change and have a greater impact and these will feed in to our bid for the new contract and our ambition for the next four years.
For those of you who have collaborated with us over the last six years, you will not be surprised that we have no intention to rest on our laurels, there is so much more for us all to do and so many people needing our unconditional support.
To our Housing Partners, I would like to express a massive thank you on behalf of the program and the people we are all supporting. You are really helping us to make life changing differences to people who have had the toughest of times and have previously been let down and ignored by the system.
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