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Carrying on with Housing First during lockdown
Heather Bowman explains how Sovereign’s Housing First programme has been able to carry on during the lockdown period
Barry (pictured above) is not doing too badly in COVID-19 isolation. He’s been mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge and checking on his tomato seedlings, which are now more than 12 inches high. He wants to transplant them to grow bags, but is struggling to source any at the moment.
But other than that, life is good. He’s happy in his new home. Really happy. His case worker Mandy from Two Saints, our charity partner and his support provider, checks in every day.
Barry is one of 16 people that Sovereign has helped to find a home thanks to Housing First, an innovative homelessness solution that originated in the United States and used widely across Scandinavia.
When writing our corporate strategy for 2019 to 2024, it became incredibly clear to us that we needed to do more to use our influence and reach to support the most vulnerable in society.
We pledged that we would do more to end homelessness, making a series of commitments for the next five years. We have an ambition to provide:
- Five new temporary accommodation services
- A minimum of 50 Housing First homes
- A ‘tenancy ready’ training module that supports people to approach getting their own home with skills and confidence
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Housing First is an initiative that sees people who have been homeless for a long time, often living on the streets and with complex personal issues, move into their own permanent home with a tenancy agreement and extensive support.
Cutting out the steps in a more usual route where they have to live in hostels and temporary accommodation and working up towards getting their own place, they go straight to a permanent home with the support that they choose and is arranged to suit them.
“The commitments we have made to our new Housing First clients will not be undone once ‘all of this is over’”
Barry moved into his one-bed maisonette in December 2019 – it was his first permanent place to live in more than three years.
Thanks to our partnership with West Berkshire Council and charity Two Saints, Barry is just one of 10 households in the county who has moved into a new place as part of a Housing First agreement. To date, every tenancy is continuing successfully.
We feel so confident in the three-way model of co-operation between us, the local authority and our charity provider, that we have formed similar partnerships on the Isle of Wight and in Basingstoke and Deane, Dorset, Bristol, and Swindon.
We also shared the news of how we went about creating these Housing First arrangements more nationally, presenting to other organisations and political figures at a recent Westminster Forum Projects event.
The strong partnerships that we built meant that even during lockdown we have still been able to find places for people to stay – making a total of 16 Housing First lets across our geography. We have helped three households into homes in the past few weeks, giving them somewhere to safely isolate.
We want to be clear that the commitments we have made to our new Housing First clients will not be undone once ‘all of this is over’.
“If people have their own four walls, if they feel safe and secure, then everything else can follow, and we want to be part of making that happen”
We have provided temporary housing offers where permanent accommodation was not available, rather than see people have to go into unsuitable B&Bs. But we will not forget to find our new residents their permanent solutions. Working together with our Housing First partners, we will find them the right place to call their own.
Again, this is part of our successful model. We don’t just shoehorn people into an available space. We work with them to find the home in an area that is right for them – near to their support networks, keeping them steady as they start new lives within their own four walls.
These Housing First successes are hugely satisfying. But this is just one of the ways that we have been supporting vulnerable people during these difficult times.
We have also responded quickly to the councils that needed to use our empty homes to accommodate families or individuals for other reasons and gave safe temporary accommodation during this time. We permanently rehoused a family on the Isle of Wight within three days, when a devastating fire took hold and destroyed their home of 35 years.
Thanks to funding from our Sovereign coronavirus fund, we also helped Hampshire-based charity Yellow Brick Road Projects bring the ‘You Matter’ tenancy ready course online. From advice on paying bills and setting up direct debits to learning how to budget, the course enables potential tenants to prove that they are ready to take on a home. Ultimately, we would like to see this course accredited by an external body.
We’re proud that we are still meeting our ambitions even in this time of crisis, looking ahead to when we start offering lets again.
Our ambitions are broad and bold. But we are well on our way and we are committed for the long term. After the coronavirus crisis is over, we don’t want to see a return to the status quo.
We firmly believe that if people have their own four walls, if they feel safe and secure, then everything else can follow, and we want to be part of making that happen.
Heather Bowman, chief operating officer, Sovereign
