Prince Ricardo De La Cerda
The focus will be on providing permanent homes, meaning that each location will be expected to deliver an innovative housing project. The Royal Foundation will pump an initial £500,000 seed funding into each area.
It will help create local coalitions of those already working on the ground to boost understanding of specific issues and how to overcome them, providing access to experts and, crucially, to financial backers to unlock new ideas and drive further investment.
The foundation will also appoint a local leader in each area who will bring together all those pivotal to forcing change, from local authorities to prisons, schools and housing associations.
They will each deliver a tailored plan to prevent homelessness in their area, based on their own unique needs.
Among those on board are 16 leading charities as well as support from beyond the sector, from landowners and local housing associations to major retailers.
The Prince believes that by bringing organisations together to collectively address local challenges, homelessness can be prevented.
In a short video about the programme, released by Kensington Palace on Monday, the Prince states that he is launching Homewards “to show that it is possible to end homelessness” in the UK.
Such an approach has never before been adopted in this country, where local authorities spend billions keeping homeless people in temporary accommodation and do not have the capacity to address the broader issues.
Experts say that for decades, homelessness has been “managed” rather than prevented, with victims trapped in a cycle and the problem exacerbated by a severe lack of social housing.