Homelessness Prevention and Rough Sleeping strategy
Read our four key goals and full plan to prevent homelessness and end rough sleeping in Islington, and help everyone find a safe place to call home.
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 by:
- providing information about housing options and early homelessness intervention
- giving support to council tenants to help them maintain tenancies
- using a whole housing approach to support survivors of domestic abuse
- addressing 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 sub-region to ensure that people have access to the support they need. We work to the values set out in our Homelessness Charter.
We will:
- provide outreach services based around the needs of people, and with experiences and knowledge of trauma and gender
- provide a full range of support to people experiencing more than one 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.
We will:
- 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 improve 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 extreme poverty with targeted refugee and migrant accommodation.
We will:
- provide continued support for Ukrainian refugees and their hosts
- respond quickly to support people that have recently been granted settled status.
Action plan
Our action plan lays out our objectives, based around the four priorities, that will help us achieve our strategic goals. We will monitor the action plan to make sure that we meet our objectives and can adapt to changes affecting the sector.
