One of our seven funding priority areas is tackling the housing crisis. Tackling the housing crisis lead Susie Dye shares more information on what we currently fund in this area, and what type of projects we want to fund next.
As part of Trust for London’s funding strategy 2024-30, we’ve committed to looking at our grants in the round. We want all the projects we fund to contribute to our mission to achieve economic and social justice for Londoners. This means that before we fund anything, we will compare it to the projects we already fund and make sure we aren’t duplicating efforts.
On top of this, we also have less money to give out. Sometimes we'll need to decide between projects, even if they both meet our goals and meet a demand. We will make few grants to new organisations this year and won’t be able to renew all our existing grants that are coming to an end. We know this is a hard time in the sector and wish we could do more.
Under the ‘tackling the housing crisis’ priority, we have three impact goals. Over the next six years, we want to fund work that moves towards these goals:
- More Londoners can advocate for their housing rights
- A comprehensive government strategy to solve the housing crisis
- A shared commitment to end temporary accommodation
Since we reopened to applications in summer last year, we’ve been taking calls from organisations interested in applying for funding, many of whom we unfortunately haven’t encouraged to apply. In this blog I want to share more detail about what we already fund in this area, and what this means for what we fund next.
Our existing funding
Data as of October 2024
Over the last 5 years the number of advice organisations we fund has grown. We are having to make difficult choices about what we continue to fund and saying ‘no’ more.
Between 2018 and 2023, Trust for London made over £9m of grants under the Good Homes and Neighbourhoods priority, many aligned to our new goals. The need to respond to the series of crises hitting London back then made it difficult to take a strategic approach.
As a result our housing grants portfolio became weighted towards our first goal: Londoners being able to claim their rights. We want our funding to be more balanced across all three goals.
What we want to fund
This year, we expect to make maybe one or two more advice grants in total. We’ll be prioritising:
- existing relationships in outer London
- organisations with specialist, skilled staff in post
- advice organisations with established strong collaboration with local policy and community partners.
We are also challenging partners to demonstrate the difference their advice is making to clients, in terms of evictions prevented, homeless families housed or moved, disrepair dealt with and so on.
Strategic London research and policy partnerships
We’re always interested in hearing about ways of working with London-wide potential; models that are rooted in communities, with committed people and good evidence behind them.
We fund a few, strategic, London-wide grants – partnering with the Mayor of London to host the London Housing Panel; support for Planning Aid for London, and contributions to research in partnership with others, such as NERA’s ground-breaking work on the link between housing affordability and economic growth.
In practice we contribute to one or two of these a year. This year we will be exploring the scope of a possible Affordable Housing Observatory, which could be modelled on the work of the Migration Observatory.
Making the most of new opportunities
The Government and Mayor’s manifesto commitments to strengthening rights and building homes for working people create opportunities but also challenges. At this moment, we need to stand by renters and communities who are less often heard in housing debates, and ensure they have what they need to influence policy.
This means that we are targeting our policy funding – under the ‘comprehensive strategy’ goal – toward a small number of equalities groups, and organisations with a focus on private and social renters. We will be less likely to fund national policy advocacy, instead primarily resourcing London groups.
We are renewing our commitment to the London Housing Panel in 2025, and have a few important, long-standing funding partnerships coming up for renewal. Hence we are expecting to make very few grants to new organisations under the ‘comprehensive strategy’ goal this year.
Homes, not homelessness services
We tend not to fund services or campaigns around rough sleeping and in the ‘homelessness sector’.
Instead we invest in trying to reduce the numbers becoming homeless in the first place, helping people fight for more safe, accessible and affordable homes.
Ultimately we seek to address the roots of the housing system, that put some people more at risk than others. Few funders support housing campaigns, whereas more are involved with ‘homelessness’.
Temporary accommodation – not currently open to applications
Our work on temporary accommodation (TA) is different from our other work, and receives external funding from Oak Foundation, City Bridge Foundation and Impact on Urban Health.
It brings people into the ‘Better TA’ cohort of funded partners who get together regularly and are expected to work collaboratively. This group are currently working together on a campaign to improve standards and amenities for people in TA.
We have begun thinking about making the Trust’s strategic goal to achieve consensus to end the use of temporary accommodation within a decade a reality. While we do this, we are effectively closed to applications for TA, and will provide an update later in the year.
As funders, we love making grants. It’s tricky saying ‘no’ more often, to work that undoubtedly makes a difference. We hope, though, that by focusing on a stronger, complementary portfolio of grants, together they will be equipped to speak loudly, help thousands, and build the power necessary to make a dent in this crisis.