Our 2020–2021 Impact Card [1] outlines the positive impact that we have had on people’s lives over the course of the year. 

As people across Northern Ireland were impacted by Covid-19 we saw increased demand for support and advice from people worried about their housing situation.

We responded by ensuring access to our frontline services was uninterrupted. We provided specialist support, pivoted our response to cater for digital demand, influenced government’s response to housing needs, and ensured that our staff were equipped and supported to continue providing our services.

Helping through advice and advocacy

• We provided advice, advocacy and representation services for 11852 clients.
• We helped to alleviate homelessness for 422 households.
• We helped 46648 people with their housing issues.

Helping through expanding our services

We developed and implemented a new housing mediation service [2] for the private rented sector, and further developed our recently established specialist service for young people, Renting Rights [3].

Helping through policy work

Our policy [4] team continued to act upon opportunities to influence policy change and this included;

• Influencing The Private Tenancies (Coronavirus Modifications) Act (NI) 2020
• Guidance for landlords and tenants
• Enhanced support to private tenants through the expansion of assistance available through Discretionary Housing Payments.

Renters Voice [5] was officially launched, to build a voice for private tenants and a culture of tenant participation in the PRS.

Helping frontline practitioners

We supported 1573 frontline practitioners through our practitioner’s helpline and 220 via our practitioners forum [6].  At the same time, our training service [7] continued to deliver specialist high quality training on housing and homelessness to 889 professionals. 

Helping in a digital age

We saw an 83% increase in users accessing our advice by digital means, we therefore developed and rolled out a digital advice service to complement telephone advice and meet user needs. We increased our social media presence, and we continued to provide advice to the general public through our public advice site [8]. Internally, we introduced new CRM systems and online platforms for improving internal communication.

Download our Impact Card [1] to read more about our work as we work toward our vision when everyone has a home.

Subscribe to our newsletter [9] to receive updates on our work.