Shared housing for young people in Enfield

Over the last six months, Alev (Head of Housing) and I have been speaking about our young people housing in Enfield at several conferences.

We have spoken at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), Crises,  National Housing Federation (NHF), Housemark and Shelter conferences in London, Manchester and Leicester. We also supported campaigns and advised Sheffield Hallam University and various Local Authorities on their shared housing offer. It’s been a great opportunity to tell others how we manage shared housing for young people. We learnt through this process, that we are quite a unique service, and not many other Housing Associations or councils provide such services for as many people as we do in Enfield.

We talked about the standard of our shared housing and why it is important to provide high quality, modern furniture and up-to-date, trendy deco to give people a sense of pride and encourage young people to look after their flat. We have found that young people were encouraged to invite their families to visit them, where they may have not kept in touch for a while because they were proud to show off their new housing.

We explained the importance of matching people when they were first given their room, to help the shared living dynamics, which can be difficult. For example, we will match people who work as they would appreciate regular hours and lifestyles, and we have women-only flats.

We give residents in our shared housing excluded Licences, not tenancies, so that we can easily manage moving residents around, and deal with any anti-social behaviour and incidents when we need to take a firm approach to make everyone feel safe.

We support residents to employment, training and voluntary work, help with the initial settling-in period, and we support them with managing their budgets and money.

We are very proud of our shared housing for young, homeless people, who wouldn’t otherwise have anywhere to live. The government has recently cancelled their plans to restrict housing benefits to under 35s at Local Housing allowance levels, which is great news for the young people and us.

If you would like to know more about our shared housing in Enfield, please email katri.wilson@originhousing.org.uk or telephone 0207 284 5497.