About this handbook

Who is this Companion for?

We hope the Companion will be useful for anyone who is concerned with the quality of service in emergency accommodation for homeless people, including direct access hostels and nightshelters. Other providers of emergency accommodation outside the homelessness sector will also find it of use.

We have particularly tried to make it relevant to:

• management committees
• managers and staff
• residents
• other services
• local authorities
• funding bodies
• policy makers.

A wide range of organisations, including voluntary organisations, registered social landlords (RSLs) and local authorities, provide emergency accommodation projects. At one end of the spectrum are some very large housing associations or local authority provided projects, for which emergency accommodation is part of a portfolio of housing and support services. At the other end are hundreds of small, local, voluntary sector projects, operating on shoestring budgets and relying on the efforts of volunteers.

We have tried to make this Companion relevant to providers at both ends of this scale, and have involved staff and residents from the whole range in the consultation for it. Through this we have seen how providers across the range of project have ideas and examples of good practice to offer to the national effort to make sure the best possible services are available to homeless people, wherever they are.

The next section, A Typology of Hostel Accommodation, describes in detail the sort of projects that are covered by this Companion.

Where to find the information you need

We have arranged the companion into five parts. The first, Theory, deals with the theory and ethos of emergency accommodation, including research and recent developments. The next two parts Creating a positive environment and managing risks deal with issues at a hostel-wide level and may be most useful to managers and deputy managers. The last two parts, The journey and The needs of individuals, deal with the more day-to-day and person-to-person issues and provide a "how to" manual that it is hoped will be of use to frontline staff in particular.

We have not re-printed the updated material in hard copy handbooks because it will be regularly updated and added to, and maintainining the content online allows for it to be an evolving and improving source of good practice. Hard copy handbooks are not available at the moment, but the website pages can be printed. See here more on printing from the handbooks

Minimum Standards

Most of the sections maintain the minimum standards from the original companion, although they no longer make reference to the "Relevent National Framework Standards" as these are no longer applicable