03/09/2026
"Prevention" is becoming a buzzword.
That's not HP365 being cynical — it's a direct quote from someone with 40 years of lived experience of homelessness, responding to our last post on LinkedIn.
He said something worth sitting with:
Support almost never exists before someone is evicted. Only after.
He's right to be angry about that.
So here's a harder question than the one we asked last week:
If "prevention" is just a word in a policy document, what would it actually need to look like to mean something?
From the response to our last post, a few answers came through loud and clear:
→ Frontline workers empowered to act early — not just tick boxes
→ Support that exists before the eviction notice, not after
→ Landlords, councils, and local charities talking to each other before crisis point
→ Community and family breakdown treated as a root cause, not just a lack of housing stock
→ Funding that reaches the people doing the work, not just the layer managing the problem
This isn't a dig at any one charity or council. Plenty of people are doing extraordinary work with very little, often stretched thin.
But if "prevention" stays a comfortable word instead of a concrete commitment, we shouldn't be shocked when someone writes this exact post again in 40 years.
HP365 doesn't have a neat answer either.
But the people closest to this problem — the ones who pushed back hardest on our last post — are the ones who should be shaping what comes next.
What would you add to that list?
Prevention. Not Crisis.
