Homelessness Strategy
Our current Homelessness Strategies
Our Homelessness Strategy sets out a ten point plan to tackle and respond to homelessness in the city and aims to:
- Prevent more people from becoming homeless in the first place
- Improve our services and response when people do become homeless
- Meet the challenges ahead and have a homelessness system fit for the future
Westminster City Council: Review of Homelessness 2019 (PDF)
Rough sleeping strategy
Our Rough Sleeping Strategy identifies 3 key priorities:
- prevention
- supporting people to rebuild their lives
- intervening to stop dangerous behaviour
Read about our detailed action plan to deliver a significant reduction in rough sleeping and address the harm it brings to individuals and communities in Westminster.
New Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy from 2024
We are re-evaluating our approach to preventing homelessness in Westminster to create a Fairer Westminster. This is everyone’s business and we want your say.
This work will update our previous strategies on homelessness and rough sleeping.
The new strategy will guide our approach to future service development, commissioning, budgeting, governance and decision making, and workforce development within Housing Needs and across the Council as a whole.
What are we trying to change/improve in this strategy?
We want to make a real difference to those who experience homelessness. We want to radically reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness, including those experiencing rough sleeping, through early intervention and prevention. To do this we will look at a broad range of topics, cohorts and approaches including health and wellbeing, temporary and supported housing, families and young people, criminal justice, asylum and migration support, rough sleeping and recovery.
The aims of the strategy are:
- To establish a clear vision and mission at Westminster City Council to prevent homelessness.
- To establish how we will work with communities and stakeholders to achieve this.
- To commit to key policy changes and establish indicators that will monitor how well we are achieving better outcomes.
We want your views to shape all parts of the strategy, including:
- What homelessness in Westminster really looks like today – your insights, data and feedback.
- What our vision and mission should be regarding homelessness – what are we really aiming for and what would success look like?
- How we go about achieving this – our ways of working and how we track progress.
- How should our work to prevent homelessness be led by those with lived experience and our communities – what should governance, scrutiny and partnership working look like?
The development of the strategy will take place over the next 12 months and we will be engaging with:
- Community groups and people affected by homelessness
- Key organisations across a broad range of service areas
- Westminster residents
Keep an eye out for events and engagement sessions that you can attend which will be updated on this page.
We will be engaging with people in multiple ways:
- Workshops
- Open events
- Peer research
- Online consultation survey
- Policy roundtables
- Pop ups at community locations
- Social media information and updates
Homelessness and rough sleeping consultation
Westminster City Council has created a new Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy which sets out our approach and commitments, as well as how we plan to get there.
This strategy has been created to focus on prevention, response and support. Informed by a robust review of homelessness in the borough, our strategy has been developed with our partners, those with lived experience of homelessness in Westminster, and a number of organisations and people who work in this space.
It is a statutory requirement we review homelessness and publish a strategy in response every five years.
We really want your feedback on this new strategy and our approach.
