Fair Housing Futures (Shelter Greater Manchester)

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Strategic purpose

To give tenants a stronger voice in debates about housing and the private rented sector.

To build more robust evidence of the solutions to address the issues of cost, quality, security, and access in the private rented sector and ensure this evidence is available and used to inform policy and practice.

Project description

The private rented sector needs to undergo significant reform before private tenants can feel truly happy and settled in their homes. Landlords and tenants both play a central role in the private rented sector, but tenants’ experiences are often overlooked. In 2016, we decided to test a place-based approach to transforming the PRS, to see if doing so could have the potential to create lasting change in the area, and act as a blueprint for work in other places.

The project was run by Shelter Greater Manchester, one of the national housing and homelessness charity’s regional chapters, and supported by Community Foundations for Lancashire and Merseyside.

Our approach for Fair Housing Futures focused on three key themes:  

• Learning: we wanted to understand not just the impact of the work we were funding, but how the approach we were taking as a project, and as a funder, impacted the conditions in which change could happen 
• People: change doesn’t happen without the commitment and courage of pioneers to drive innovation, so the choice of where we chose to work, and with whom, was fundamental  
• Power and collaboration: we went into this project with a clear intention of not wanting to be the ‘funder in the room’ but as an equal partner in the change, bringing more than just funding, and doing ‘with’ and not ‘to’. 

The project set out clear outcomes and was approached with three fundamental elements in mind: 

• The devolution of decision making: Establishing a partnership board with stakeholders from across the Greater Manchester PRS, including renters, landlords, powerholders, researchers and charities (including the Nationwide Foundation). 
• Being evidence-led: at the start of the project, the Partnership Board decided to ‘map the patch’ by commissioning a two-stage research programme, which built an evidence-based understanding of the PRS in Greater Manchester and the change that was needed. 
• Test and Learn: The establishment of a test and learn grant fund to trial innovative local solutions to problems in the PRS in Greater Manchester.

We have published an in depth evaluation of the project, in collaboration with Curiosity Society, details of which can be found in this blog. 

Back to funding 2016–present