21 January 2008

Dundee leads major European homelessness project

Researchers in Town and Regional Planning at the University of Dundee have been awarded £500,000 to lead a major European-wide project to improve monitoring of homelessness and homeless policies across the continent.

Homelessness has been identified as one of the key societal problems under the European Union’s social protection and social inclusion strategy.

The `MPHASIS’ project led by Bill Edgar and Barbara Illsley at the University of Dundee aims to improve the monitoring of the problem across 20 European countries in a co-ordinated manner.

"Homelessness and housing exclusion is a problem seen right across the European Union and we need to develop strategies to help combat it across all the differing cultures and societies we see across the Continent but these strategies need to be evidence based," said Bill Edgar, who is based in Town and Regional Planning at the University.

"Some countries have a bigger problem than others, some countries have more developed systems of housing policy than others. What this project is about is helping produce a framework which can be used to help monitor and tackle the problem whatever the position is in any one country."

"To fully tackle the problem you need to have a grasp of how many people are homeless or at risk of housing exclusion and understand their social profile."

"The main focus of this project is to promote mutual learning and knowledge transfer and to build the capacity of countries to collect reliable information on the nature of the problem, the groups affected and the trends involved. Only in this way can sensible strategies be developed."

The project has been funded by the office of the EU’s Director-General for Employment and Social Affairs.

Mr Edgar said the systems in place to tackle homelessness and housing shortages are varied across the continent.

"The southern European countries are still playing catch-up in terms of developed housing policy and homelessness strategies," he said.

"There is also a lot of poor housing in some of the former Eastern Bloc countries. A UN study in Romania, for example, showed that without immediate investment something like 40% of their housing stock won’t be fit for habitation by 2015."

The project follows on from earlier homelessness projects carried out by Bill Edgar and colleagues in Town and Regional Planning, based within the School of Social Sciences at the university.

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