It’s World Homelessness Day on Sunday and we’re joining organisations across the globe to highlight the issues faced by those living without a permanent home and how the work we do can ease the problem.

Whether its people sofa surfing, living in temporary accommodation, or sleeping rough on the streets, homelessness takes many forms and they have all been rising since 2010.

According to Crisis in 2019/20 289,000 single people, couples and families were judged as being homeless or threatened with homelessness in England.

Playing our part in reducing homelessness, particularly in the big four local authority areas, is one of the goals in the Bromford Strategy. And our three homelessness KPI’s are shaping the work we do in this area. These are:

Build more – by the end of 2023 we will convert 150 of the homes in our development pipeline from affordable rent to social rent to help maximise access to adequate, safe and affordable housing in our big 4 local authority areas.

House more – we will ensure that we let more than 18% of our homes to ‘statutory homeless’ households in our big 4 local authority areas

Help more – by the end of 2023 we will have established a new Housing First service in at least one more of our big four areas

And looking ahead we will continue to work to:

Prevent more – we will review our tenancy failures and work with colleagues and local authorities to develop our Duty to Inform best practice and establish a homeless prevention toolkit to ensure we do all we can to prevent our customers from becoming homeless wherever possible.

Homelessness lead Hazel O’Halloran said: “World Homelessness Day is a great reminder of why we exist: to provide homes to those who need it. Over the last six months we have been exploring ways to reduce homelessness, by preventing it from happening to our own customers and by supporting initiatives that could offer a way out for those who are currently homeless. We’re doing this in a number of ways, through tackling the root causes of homelessness, Housing First schemes, using data and evidence to enable us to deliver the right services and harnessing our approach to safeguarding our customers and communities.

“Ultimately, we are ambitious in what we aim to achieve but we can’t do this alone – so by working with our local authorities and other organisations we hope to make any experience of homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring.”