About Us
Andy Gale Housing Consultancy is headed up by Andy Gale and was founded in 2012
to support local authorities with homelessness, allocations strategies and policies.
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“Over many years, I have worked with many local authorities to support your work in tackling homelessness and implementing allocations and lettings policies.
Since the Homelessness Reduction Act became law I have worked with, or trained staff, from over 250 local authorities across England. Many local authorities use the free resources I produce, including the HRA template letters pack and various guides for prevention casework and allocations. The free email advice service I run for local authority questions on HRA cases, has now passed 1,000 answered queries.
The impact of Covid-19, in the short and longer term, is likely to be the most challenging time in homelessness and allocations for local authorities, having to reduce homelessness and end rough sleeping, whilst demand for housing continuing to be high and growing. This is all in the context of budgets under pressure, perhaps more so than ever before.
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I’m pleased to let you know that I am now working with Anna Whalen, who left MHCLG in September 2019 where she was a senior adviser in the Homelessness Advice and Support Team. Many of you will know Anna well from her work in the Civil Service and local authorities on homelessness and her specialist work
on youth homelessness.
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We have significant experience and knowledge and between us we can offer you a wide range of support and training in all aspects of homelessness, temporary accommodation and allocations. We remain driven and determined to help authorities and their partners to make a difference in whatever way we can."
Andy Gale
Andy is one of the best-known names in the field of homelessness. He has wide experience of Central Government and Local Government work including heading up what was the Homelessness Division of the Government’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2007 and managing services at a senior level in the London Borough’s of Harrow and Ealing.
He is widely respected as a national expert on statutory homelessness work and is regularly asked to speak at national conferences.
Andy writes widely on the subject of homelessness and allocations and has published numerous free guidance toolkits to local authorities. These are resources used by many to plan and deliver their statutory services. For example, his ‘Homelessness Reduction Act Template Letters’ are used by the majority of local authorities in England as their adopted letters set.
He has both operational, policy and strategic skills and experience and is commissioned on average by over 30 local authorities a year to deliver numerous projects, including reviewing the structure, processes and costs in respect of the impact that the Homelessness Reduction Act has had re: the rise in homelessness applications, caseloads and temporary accommodation costs.
Andy developed the Housing Options and Preventing Homelessness Model. This gained national recognition and became the ‘blueprint’ for the Housing Options and Prevention Model. This model is now universally accepted and implemented by all local authorities across England and Wales.
In 2008 Andy was awarded an OBE in recognition of his work in developing the Prevention and Options model.
Anna Whalen
Until September 2019 Anna was a Senior Adviser in MHCLG’s Homelessness Advice and Support Team. This was for a 2 year secondment during the early the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act. Prior to that she had been an Adviser for the Department between 2008 - 2009 and in 2011 - 2013.
Well known as a leading expert on youth homelessness. Anna also works as an associate for St Basils, one of the largest and most innovative youth homelessness agencies in the UK, as well as in a freelance capacity on homelessness.
Through her work with St Basils and with MHCLG, she played a leading role in the development and updating of 3 youth homelessness toolkits: the ‘Positive Pathway’, the ‘Care Leaver’s Accommodation and Support Framework’ and the ‘Youth Justice Accommodation Pathway.’
She has also worked in the voluntary sector ( Save the Children Fund) and in local government (Hull City Council) where she set up and managed a ground breaking, award winning multi-agency service for young people, including teenagers in and leaving care, homelessness and a range of other services.
Anna was also a Head of Service for Hull City Council, with corporate responsibility for equalities, cohesion, asylum and refugee services, partnerships and the voluntary sector. During this time she played a key role leading the authority through rapid change on equalities.
Bringing operational and strategic experience of service improvement, Anna often works on aspects such as partnership development, change management and commissioning and she has a particular interest in culture change, customer focussed services and performance improvement. She delivers training, workshops, undertakes service reviews and is regularly commissioned to write reports on policy and practice issues.