Shelter : Initial Research

HISTORY: 
Shelter is a registered charity that helps millions of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through their advice, support and legal services. They also campaign to make sure that, one day, no one will have to turn to them for help; freeing England and Scotland from the problems of homelessness.

Shelter was founded in England in 1966 by the Reverend Bruce Kenrick, who was horrified by the state of the tenements round his Notting Hill parish. Later came the setting up of Shelter Scotland followed in 1968.

Kenrick had formed the Notting Hill Housing Trust three years earlier to provide decent, affordable houses to rent in the area.

As slums proliferated in the inner cities, homeless families were forced into overcrowded hostels, and notorious landlords like Peter Rachman made the headlines, Kenrick saw the need for a national campaigning body to complement the work of charities providing housing. Shelter was born.

1966 was also the year that the BBC screened Ken Loach's film about homelessness, Cathy Come Home. Watched by 12 million people on its first broadcast, the film alerted the public, the media, and the government to the scale of the housing crisis, and Shelter gained many new supporters.

Capitalising on the success of Ken Loach’s gritty docudrama Cathy Come Home, screened a couple of weeks before their launch, Shelter mounted a series of successful campaigns consisting of real-life stories with hard-hitting facts.

They told hundreds of stories. An old woman dying of TB in a near-derelict flat. A family cooking on an open fire because they had no kitchen. Children suffering life-changing injuries playing on slum clearance sites.

The public became outraged that these conditions existed in modern Britain which resulted in huge fundraising success and there was a wave of support for our campaigns. One hundred local Shelter groups formed in just six months after thier launch.

Shelter also started to achieve real political success when two party leaders mentioned their report 'Face the Facts' in  their 1969 party conference speeches and their founding Director, Des Wilson, spoke to packed rooms at conferences, rallies, and town halls across the country.

Later, Shelter’s tireless campaigning resulted in a major win when the government passed the Housing Act in 1974. This act provided housing associations with full government funding.


As a result, their resources were freed up for campaigning on other important issues, such as the rights of private tenants and those facing homelessness.

More than four decades of constant lobbying have pressured government into making some key changes to policy and legislation, and Shelter has celebrated some landmark achievements in recent years. These include the ground breaking commitment in Scotland that, by 2012, every homeless person will have the right to a home.

Key Events:
Since the late 1960s, we have pioneered new services that have responded to local housing issues, such as the Liverpool Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project (1969-1972), or ‘SNAP’. This project worked with residents living in slum housing to build neighbourhoods they wanted to live in.

Today, programmes such as The Homeless Families’ Support Service and Inspiring Change Manchester carry on helping those most in need. In 2014–15, Shelter helped 68,946 people through our face-to-face advice and support services.

Thanks to endless campaigning from Shelter, the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was passed. This seminal piece of legislation codified in law a definition of homelessness that went beyond ‘rooflessness’ and ruled that local authorities have a legal duty to house homeless people.
Their contribution to achieving the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act remains one of our greatest achievements.

In the 1990s, Shelter discovered 31 families living in a Bristol bed and breakfast with one cooker between them, and decided to run a campaign that called the local authorities to account and offered a solution. n

In 1980 we helped to convince the government to give social housing tenants the same security of tenure as private renters. This legal change was fiercely opposed by local authorities, but provided protection for families facing eviction at short notice.

In 1993 we strengthened our legal clout by setting up an in-house legal arm. We employed top housing lawyers to fight directly on behalf of the people we help.

In 2002, a new Housing Act strengthened the legal protections for people facing homelessness.