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The National Housing Federation's initiative, In Business for Neighbourhoods, urges all housing associations to ensure that they focus on users, to diversify funding and manage costs, while working in partnerships with others to serve the whole population of a community or neighbourhood. General‐needs housing providers can't be ‘in business for neighbourhoods’ without meeting the needs of frail older people, care leavers, people recently released from prison or women fleeing domestic violence. Providers of supported housing hold in their hands many of the tools to enable this engagement.Supported housing is the only part of the housing association sector with a clear and untainted focus on users, the only part with a rigorous focus on costs and efficiency and the only part developed through partnership, owing everything to partnership. In their report, In Business to Support People ‐ the Future of Supported Housing, Julia Unwin and Peter Molyneux argue that supported housing agencies must be allowed to find ways to grow as organisations and to cope with a highly unstable market if they are to respond effectively to the challenges posed by increasing demand for citizenship and choice.

Health impact assessment (HIA) is emerging as a useful way of ascertaining whether housing‐related activities have a positive or negative effect on people's health. The article outlines the key elements of the process and the way in which it can be adopted as part of housing agencies practice.

The flu ‘epidemic’ and the ‘shortage’ of beds within the NHS dominated the headlines in the first weeks of the twenty‐first century. That this very twentieth‐century issue should have reared its head so soon is perhaps unsurprising. However, it is disappointing that discussions about health should, yet again, be so focused on the provision of acute care.

The move towards personalisation in health, as in other services, provides the opportunity to make a new and more humanising relationship between providers and the people they serve. Research by NHS Kensington and Chelsea indicates a direction in which commissioners of housing, health and social services could usefully go.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate challenges of building entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral places. The entrepreneurial ecosystem concept is developing a rising popularity among both academics and policymakers in recent years where much of the attention has been put in major urban cities. However, on the way to achieve balanced growth and equity, peripheral places should not be neglected. Thus, this paper links literature on ecosystem with peripheral region studies in creating a conceptual framework of developing entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral places.

The paper first reviews literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems and challenges that peripheral places facing in particular. Then, taking into consideration of literature from both fields, a conceptual framework is developed. In order to better illustrate the framework, a case study on Guildford’s digital gaming industry is reviewed based on secondary data.

Though facing various challenges such as smallness, remoteness and lack of resources, peripheral places can take advantage of the digital technology and build an entrepreneurial ecosystem of its own kind through holistic collaborative approach to tackle issues around finance, talents, socio-culture environment, infrastructure, markets and policy.

The paper is among the first to focus on developing a holistic conceptual framework in building entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral areas. It can lead to a range of further research topics and contribute to develop viable practices particularly for policymakers.

The question of how local authorities will manage fixed budgets for the Supporting People (SP) programme raises concerns among service users and providers. These concerns are compounded by the introduction of the new distribution formula that is intended eventually to even out spending across authorities; some people will see their slice of the cake grow, and for others their slice will be nibbled away.It is unfortunate, if perhaps inevitable, that the debate about SP has become mired with the issue of funding. Quality and continuous improvement have become confused with the determination of value for money. Commissioners and providers squabbling over funding streams have compromised the ideals of person‐centred services. But is it all too easy to focus on the difficulties within the programme? This article will examine the debate over eligibility for SP funding in the light of the wider aims of the programme. It will consider the implications for service users and providers and look at the broader influences on the climate of housing with care and support.

Governance is becoming an increasingly important concept in European theoretical debates and in political practice as a new way to manage public policies, since the public sector reforms in the 1980s. However, the debate in Latin America has different characteristics than in Europe, so it is necessary to provide a critical review of the proposed agenda for the transformation of the state in the region, and of the transfer of the concept of governance by multilateral agencies. To understand these changes, this chapter examines three key areas of reforms in Latin America and the privatization of public services, new social policy proposals, and the decentralization process. This will help us understand the tension between normative models and specific patterns of governance that prevail in Latin America.

The purpose of this paper is to identify good practice in conducting outreach for homeless people, and hence to provide recommendations for future library outreach projects.

The authors examine of four case studies taken from the library literature, and conduct six semi‐structured interviews with outreach and/or inclusion librarians from library authorities in South and West Yorkshire.

The recommendations include: developing partnerships with relevant organisations; removing proof‐of‐identity requirements for joining the library; disseminating the results obtained in projects; using book deposits and mobile library stops; training library staff to ensure that they are aware of relevant issues; building trust in the target audience; ensuring that outreach is tailored to the specific needs of different groups of homeless people; and using a range of methods to evaluate project effectiveness.

Identification of themes common to the published case studies and to the interviews provides a reasoned basis for the recommendations that are presented. These recommendations provide, for the first time in the UK, clear guidelines for future outreach projects for homeless people.