Institute of Global Homelessness<\/a>, a Homewards national advisor, and one of the world’s leading academics on the issue \u2014 and the conversation moves quickly from buildings to systems.<\/p>\n“Homelessness isn’t inevitable. It absolutely isn’t,” he said. “Everyone has a right to a home. And the evidence tells us it’s possible to prevent and end homelessness.” Finland is the case study he and his peers point to most often \u2014 a country that built a strategy around guaranteed accommodation and adequate income, sustained it across electoral cycles, and watched homelessness collapse. When successive governments weakened those pillars, the numbers crept back up. The lesson, as Mackie puts it, is brutally simple: we already know what works.<\/p>\n
What Homewards is doing, in his view, is twofold. It’s shifting a long-stuck narrative \u2014 from crisis response to prevention, from individual failure to systemic failure \u2014 and it’s using the convening power of the Royal Foundation to bring actors to the table who have historically been absent. Landowners. Banks. Employers. Furniture providers. Schools running upstream interventions to identify children at risk of family breakdown before homelessness ever begins.<\/p>\n
“The homelessness sector knows most of the other actors in the sector well,” Mackie said. “What’s been really hard is bringing in some of the actors that Homewards has managed to bring in.” Pret has made hiring commitments. Banks are working on predictive data to identify households heading toward crisis. In Aberdeen, the Homewards focus is on bringing empty properties back into use; in Newport, it’s unlocking land that had been written off as unusable. Six UK locations, each running a different experiment in what “rare, brief and unrepeated” actually requires.<\/p>\n
The Duke of Cornwall during a visit to a new Duchy of Cornwall housing development in Nansledan, marking the final stages of a project that includes homes purpose-built to address homelessness.<\/p>\n
Andrew Parsons \/ Kensington PalaceThe Leadership Behind It<\/p>\n
What’s striking, in conversation with the people doing this work, is how often Prince William’s personal involvement comes up unprompted. “It’s been really interesting to see him pushing his various teams to make this happen and make this work,” Meacock said. “There’s a genuine desire to make a difference \u2014 on-the-ground difference in these individual projects, and then that systemic change and aspiration in terms of the wider work of Homewards. And yes, there have been detractors, because there always are. But keeping steady on course and pushing through and making these changes happen \u2014 that’s all coming from the Prince.”<\/p>\n
It is a conviction Prince William himself has expressed clearly: “Homewards aims to give people across the UK hope that homelessness can be prevented by showing them the progress we can make when we collaborate. It’s a big task, but I firmly believe that by working together it is possible to make homelessness rare, brief and unrepeated, and I am very much looking forward to working with our six locations to make our ambition a reality.”<\/p>\n
It is, in other words, what convening power looks like when it’s used well: not as ceremony, but as leverage.<\/p>\n
What Nansledan Proves<\/p>\n
The hardest thing about ending homelessness isn’t technical. We know how to build dignified homes. We know how to wrap support around the people living in them. We know which populations are most at risk and why. What we have lacked is the political will, the coalitions, and the moral imagination to act at the speed and scale the problem demands.<\/p>\n
Nansledan doesn’t solve homelessness in Britain. Sixteen homes, even sixteen extraordinary ones, won’t. But it does something arguably more valuable: it proves the model. It shows what becomes possible when a landowner, a charity, a royal foundation, and a community of people with lived experience design something together. And it offers a template that, if the will exists, can be replicated wherever land, capital, and care can be brought into the same room.<\/p>\n
Which, as Pete Mackie reminded me, is no longer a question of can. It’s a question of must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Duke of Cornwall during a visit to a new Duchy of Cornwall housing development in Nansledan, marking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[84483,93,61,60,202693,167148,624,202692],"class_list":["post-469088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-duchy-of-cornwall","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nansledan","tag-newquay","tag-prince-william","tag-st-petrocs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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