These strategies should consider strategic priorities, partnerships, needs assessment, and delivery plans, and require a thorough understanding of supported housing needs and availability. The Act promotes collaboration between housing and care authorities to improve supported housing planning, commissioning, and delivery.
The new statutory guidance on developing Local Supported Housing Strategies under the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 marks a significant shift in how supported housing is planned and overseen in England. For the first time, local housing authorities are under a clear duty to produce and publish a Local Supported Housing Strategy, with the first required by 31 March 2027 and updated at least every five years.
From Reactive Oversight to Strategic Planning
The Act requires councils to take a whole-system view. Strategies must cover Supported Exempt Accommodation, but authorities are encouraged to go further including floating support, Housing First, Shared Lives and other housing-with-care models where they meet local need.
Each strategy must be built around four core elements:
- Strategic priorities
- Partnerships
- Needs assessment
- Delivery plan
That structure may sound familiar, but the depth now expected is different. Councils must assess both current availability and projected need over the next five years, backed by consistent national data reporting to MHCLG. This includes stock numbers, client groups, voids, move-on delays, commissioning sources and unmet need.
The Data Challenge
Of course, one of the biggest practical barriers to delivering robust strategies is data. Since the end of the Supporting People programme and the removal of the St Andrews system, which previously provided a national framework for recording supported housing supply and outcomes, there has been no consistent, comprehensive dataset for supported housing across England.
Information is often fragmented across homelessness/housing options teams, Housing Benefit, adult social care, children’s services, probation, public health, community safety, providers and commissioners, each holding partial insight but rarely a complete picture. Some provision sits outside formal commissioning arrangements entirely. As a result, estimating unmet need, move-on blockages or future demand is inherently complex.
The new annual reporting requirements may help rebuild a more consistent evidence base over time. But in the short term, many areas will need to triangulate data from multiple systems, provider returns and local intelligence and accept that the first iteration of their strategy may involve informed estimation rather than precision.
Stronger Alignment Between Housing and Care
One of the most important (and potentially transformative) elements is the duty on social services authorities to assist housing authorities and to have regard to the strategy when exercising their functions.
Supported housing sits at the intersection of housing, adult social care, children’s services, public health and probation. The guidance makes it clear that planning must reflect that reality. A range of partners, including Integrated Care Boards, providers and residents themselves are expected to be part of developing and reviewing strategies.
For areas already struggling with siloed commissioning or fragmented pathways, this is both a challenge and an opportunity.
Delivery Not Just Diagnosis
The strategy must go beyond identifying gaps. It must set out:
- Capital and revenue funding routes
- Referral pathways (including gateway or panel approaches)
- Integration with future licensing regimes
- Clear move-on pathways into general needs housing
Early move-on planning, tackling affordability barriers and reducing voids are all explicitly referenced. This is about flow through the system, not just managing placements.
What This Means in Practice
For local authorities, this is a chance to move from reactive oversight of exempt accommodation to proactive market shaping.
For providers, it means engagement will need to be more strategic, demonstrating quality, data transparency and alignment with local priorities.
And for residents, if done well, it should mean clearer pathways, better coordinated support and housing that genuinely meets need.
The 2023 Act doesn’t just regulate supported housing. It reframes it as an essential part of local housing, health and care infrastructure.
The real test will not be whether strategies are published by 2027, but whether they genuinely change how supported housing is planned, commissioned and delivered.
To find out more about supported housing strategies, click below to read our recent blog that answers some key questions. https://www.neilmorland.co.uk/post/creating-local-supported-housing-strategies
