NEWS & DEVELOPMENTS
The updated Homelessness Code of Guidance adds an intentional homelessness exemption for care leavers and a young people chapter requiring joint working. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 mandates refreshed local offers. Tameside’s Positive Pathway aligns services via five stages for care leavers and youth justice groups.
The updated Homelessness Code of Guidance adds an intentional homelessness exemption for care leavers and a young people chapter requiring joint working. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 mandates refreshed local offers. Tameside’s Positive Pathway aligns services via five stages for care leavers and youth justice groups.
The UK government has published the updated Homelessness Code of Guidance, setting out the new intentional homelessness exemption for certain care leavers and a brand-new chapter on young people. This comes as the provisions of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, came in to force from 30 September, which also includes the requirement for every council to have a refreshed care leaver local offer in place.
The new chapter covers the how housing authorities should use their Part 7 duties for 16- and 17-year-olds and for 18- to 24-year-olds, corporate parenting, and the additional duties owed to care leavers who are homeless or at risk.
Essentially, as well as making sure that needs of care experienced young people are recognised holistically after they have left care and up until the age of 25, what these changes to the guidance are doing is setting out more clearly the requirement for housing and children’s services to join up and work together.
The local offer guidance says councils must publish how they will prevent homelessness for care leavers under 25, how housing and leaving care teams work together when a tenancy is at risk, and what support comes from every department, not just children's services.
The new chapter in the Homelessness Code of Guidance sets out the requirement for “housing authorities to work with children’s services, social care, education, health, youth justice, voluntary, community and faith sector organisations, and other relevant services where it is necessary to prevent or relieve homelessness and to support a young person to secure and sustain accommodation”. It also sets out that joint working arrangements should be designed to support timely referrals, information sharing, and clear responsibilities between services, underpinned by locally agreed joint protocols.
Most local authorities will have joint protocols, an offer for care leavers, specific youth homelessness services, prevention tools in place and so on. But often these can be a bit fragmented, not provide the complete range of services and support young people need and housing services may be doing things that children’s services are not aware of and vice versa. This can be even more challenging in a two-tier authority system where housing and children’s services are not the same organisation.
Positive Pathways
Our recent work in Tameside was addressing exactly this issue, we worked with the local authority's officers responsible for children's services and housing, alongside young people and with input from housing providers, charities and other organisations, to establish positive accommodation and support pathways for young people, care leavers and young people involved in the criminal justice system. The pathways are bespoke to Tameside, but based on the frameworks created by St Basils, to help local authorities and their partners work together to prevent youth homelessness.
The Positive Pathway has five stages:
There are also sister frameworks for care leavers, developed with Barnardo's, and for young people in the youth justice system. Between them they cover most of what the new chapter and the local offer guidance are asking for.
Next steps
The pathway helps you get everything you already have in one place, so you can see where the gaps and overlaps are and agree who is responsible for what.
A good place to start is mapping what you've got against the five stages. For example, who picks up a 16-year-old who's been asked to leave, and does housing know if children's services are already involved? What happens when a care leaver's tenancy is at risk, or a young person is leaving custody? In a two-tier area, do this with the county and district together.
Then check your joint protocol against the new chapter and your local offer. Is it current, does it cover 16- and 17-year-olds, care leavers and young people in the justice system, and do frontline staff in both housing and children's services know what it says?
If any of this feels daunting, or you'd just like a sounding board on putting a Positive Pathway in place or checking the one you've got against the new code, do get in touch.
