The city’s Health & Social Care Partnership (GCHSCP) will recruit partners to work with them over the next seven to 10 years to transform Glasgow’s homelessness services.

At the end of this year, service providers will be invited to submit group bids to join the Alliance which will tackle rough sleeping and prevent and alleviate homelessness in the city.

The Alliance will work to reduce the amount of time people spend in homelessness services and increase access to mainstream tenancies - with additional support provided if needed. In the medium to long term, this should reduce dependency on temporary, stop gap accommodation. It will also be responsible for budget management and allocations for purchased homelessness services from the start of the contract in 2019.

People who have personal experience of homelessness will also be involved in the Alliance and have already taken part in four stakeholder workshops on its creation. Importantly, they will assist in evaluating the bids submitted from prospective partners.

GCHSCP currently buys a number of homelessness services from Third Sector partners. The new Alliance will foster closer collaborative working and strive to end rough sleeping in the city, prevent homelessness and alleviate its impact, reduce the length of time people spend in temporary accommodation, minimise repeated homelessness and increase tenancy sustainment for people who were formerly homeless.

Councillor Mhairi Hunter, chair of the Partnership’s integration joint board, said: “This is a really innovative and exciting development. We are taking a leap into uncharted territory here, but we need to develop new approaches to tackle this complex social issue. There is nothing of this type in the UK. Glasgow will be leading the way by formalising arrangements with partners to make best use of the resources available.

“It will be a genuine partnership and ground-breaking stuff. We look forward to working collaboratively with partners to develop this ambitious new venture.”

The move comes after Glasgow City Council was strongly criticised for leaving people in temporary accommodation for too long.

A report by the Scottish Housing Regulator from April found that the local authority secured homes for nearly 2,000 families in 2016/17, around half of those it had a duty to house, while people spent on average 238 days in temporary accommodation.

Shelter Scotland led a protest in July against the “shocking scale of unlawful activity” from the council in denying homeless people their rights.

The housing and homelessness charity said that the latest official statistics showed the council broke the law 3,025 times last year by not fulfilling their legal duty to provide homeless people that came to them for help with temporary accommodation.

The council responded with a new action plan to streamline processes.