Ange’s Housing Blog

By Ange Rochford-Briggs, Social Housing Strategy & Partnerships Lead

Welcome to the first of my monthly blogs! I’m delighted to have joined the team and to be able to use my 20 years of housing and 10 years of furnished tenancy experience to help fight furniture poverty and support social landlords on their journey to tackle it.

Since starting in my new role at the beginning of July, I’ve been very busy focused on one of our most important documents – The Blueprint for Furniture Provision in Social Housing.

EFP originally developed and published the Blueprint in 2022 and we are delighted to have updated it and relaunched it at the recent Housing Community Summit earlier in September.  The document is aimed at housing providers who are looking for a practical guide to introducing furnished tenancies. It is a detailed (and hopefully) comprehensive handbook, which features practical advice, up to date info on relevant legislation and much more.

This has all been possible thanks to the support of the Fusion21 Foundation. They funding the original report and are joint-funding my role along with End Furniture Poverty. We are very grateful for their ongoing commitment to ending furniture poverty.

One of the most important elements of the Blueprint are the case studies, sourced from providers from across the UK, who share their varying experiences and approaches to supporting their customers in furniture poverty. They demonstrate the fantastic work being delivered by all types and sizes of providers and they bring this good practice to life. We feel sharing good practice is one of the most important parts of our work and as part of this, my next step is to develop the good practice and resources section of our End Furniture Poverty website. We intend to include example agreements, letters, department-specific information, more in-depth case studies, all using a variety of media. Look out for the evolution of the website – and once again, feedback and requests for specific information are most welcome.

Another important part of my role is to deliver the housing summit or round table approach to tackling furniture poverty, developed by EFP over recent years. The first summit, spear-headed by  Liverpool City Council’s Public Health team, was held in city’s Town Hall. It brought together all social landlords operating in Liverpool and has led to almost all of them launching their own furnished tenancy scheme, with our partner furniture rental service, Furniture Flex.

Furniture Flex was devised by EFP in partnership with our colleagues in FRC, our sister charity, and is specifically designed to overcome all of the challenges landlords have told us that they face when considering furniture provision. It’s cost neutral, flexible and with lots of additional administrative support.

We are keen to replicate this success across the UK and are currently discussing the use of this approach with Zoe Franklin MP’s team in Guildford and are in discussions about housing summits in other parts of the UK. Please get in touch to find out more about Furniture Flex or if you are interested in finding out more about a housing summit in your area.

We were delighted to see the inclusion of flooring in the consultation on the new Decent Homes standard. Flooring tends to be one of the most expensive items for new tenants to source and it makes such a big difference to quality of life in terms of warmth, comfort, safety, reduction of noise and damp and mould. Claire, our Director, has met with the consultation team, she stressed our strong support for flooring to be included in the new standard, and we eagerly await the outcome of the consultation.

We were also pleased to see a Best Practice Guide to Furniture Provision included in the consultation as well and hope our Blueprint can be used as the foundation for this guide.

I am here to help so if you would like to talk about how I can support you to explore furniture provision, or if you are already delivering a scheme and would like to share your experiences and expertise with the sector, do get in touch.

See you next month!