Homelessness Prevention and Rough Sleeping Strategy
Our strategy for preventing and eliminating homelessness and rough sleeping in Islington.
Everyone who is homeless should have a right to a safe, decent and genuinely affordable place to call home. We aim to help our residents to maintain or find settled accommodation and to find the support they need to thrive.
We work across departments and alongside commissioned services and in partnership with local community, faith and grassroots groups to prevent homelessness and eliminate rough sleeping in Islington.
We will deliver our strategy through four priorities.
Our four priorities
Preventing and relieving homelessness through early and tailored intervention
We work to prevent and relieve homelessness through:
- Providing information about housing options and early homelessness intervention
- Tenancy sustainment support for council tenants
- A whole housing approach to support survivors of domestic abuse
- Address youth homelessness
Eliminating rough sleeping by helping people into settled housing
We aim to end rough sleeping in Islington by working with our partners and jointly across the subregion to ensure that people have access to the support they need. We work to the values set out in our Homelessness Charter.
- Provide person-centred, trauma-informed and gender-informed outreach services
- Provide comprehensive support to individuals experiencing multiple disadvantage
- Use all available funding to provide supported housing for former rough sleepers
Improving housing options available to meet the needs of our residents
We aim to provide every individual accessing our services with a realistic, sustainable, good quality housing option where people can feel safe and maintain contact with their family and friends
- Make the best use of our available housing
- Build new council homes for local people
- purchase ex-right to buy council properties to provide good quality temporary accommodation in the borough
- work to drive up standards in the private rented sector
Providing accommodation and resettlement services to refugees and migrants
Islington became an accredited Borough of Sanctuary in 2023. We work to make Islington a place of welcome and end destitution through the delivery of targeted refugee and migrant accommodation responses.
- Provide continued support for Ukrainian refugees and their hosts
- Deliver a rapid response service to support people recently granted settled status
The action plan
We have developed an action plan to deliver our strategy through a number of objectives which are based around our four priorities. The action plan will be monitored to make sure that we meet our objectives and can adapt to changes affecting the sector.
