Women fleeing violent partners finding secure homes thanks to charity partnership with private fund
Women fleeing violent partners are set to move into safe homes in a new initiative that uses private finance. The Women in Safe Homes fund is using £29million in private funds from social impact investors to build 120 homes in the UK – with the first of 30 homes in Edinburgh finally handing out keys to families this month.
The WiSH fund has attracted increased interest due the impoverished state of finance at local and national government level, which is hugely exacerbating Scotland’s homelessness crisis.
The Scottish Government was slammed last week for the decision to cut the nation’s homebuilding budget by £200million – which campaigners claim will hugely worsen the calamitous homes shortage.
The new raft of homes in Edinburgh will put property worth £8million in the hands of the Cyrenians charity, who are kitting out 30 homes to their specifications, helping transform the lives of women and their children.
Cyrenians director of service Amy Hutton said women in violent relationships are among the most vulnerable to homelessness in Scotland – with huge numbers forced to seek help. Hutton said current cash squeezes mean private funding and new approaches, like repurposing existing empty buildings, are becoming essential avenues to explore.
She said: “We have a housing emergency declared within the city that is well documented but even with an endless amount of money we couldn’t solve it quickly by building alone.
“We don’t have the land to build the level of social housing that we need and the private rented sector has become almost entirely unaffordable for the people that we work with.
“The demands come from students and Airbnb and the rest of it, so we are looking to existing housing stock that exists already in the city and get it available to the people that we work with. We need to be thinking quite creatively and we need to be bringing in the private sector, as it has to be part of the solution.”
Hutton said Cyrenians would never be able to raise £8 million through donations but she hopes the first 30 homes may pave the way for similar partnerships with private funding sources.
She said: “The properties we are opening, starting early in the New Year, are not in blocks of flats. They have a front door and they are in buildings that families can feel secure in, feel they can build a real home there. The sooner we get families out of the acute crisis and into such properties the better.”
Hutton said Christmas is a time of great tension for many families. She said: “There’s an intensity of being around each other more over Christmas, there can be significant stress around money and finances when you’re throwing that into an already very strained relationship.
“And greater use of alcohol can lead to violent incidents in insecure family settings. It’s not unusual for us to come across women to house who have fled with their children in the middle of the night with literally a bag – virtually nothing with them.
“There’s been no chance for children to say goodbye to their friends or family. There’s no idea where they’re going either.
“I think that that’s quite terrifying. And what we quite often find is that women have relinquished or been forced into relinquishing all financial control so they have no money, no sense of how they can access support or help.”
Hutton said women often need help to start from scratch, helping them access benefits, enabling them to get money for food at a time when they’re totally isolated and distressed. She said: “As it stands there is very limited refuge provision for women fleeing domestic abuse.
Women face homelessness hell because of violent partners – facts
In Scotland, domestic abuse is the main cause of women’s homelessness.
Latest annual figures for Scotland, for 2022, show:
•There were 64,807 incidents of domestic abuse, 81% of which were experienced by women
•1 in 5 women who experience domestic abuse face homelessness at some point
•34,000 homeless applications were made, of which 6,800 are single women
•5,780 are single women with children
•There are 477 refuge spaces in Scotland – but 58% of women who requested access to a refuge could not be accommodated because of lack of space
•Only 1 in 6 women making a homeless application as a result of domestic abuse gets a refuge space when she needs it
“They often end up going into mainstream homeless accommodation and that can mean going to HMOs and sharing with strangers who may come and go during the night. It can be very unsettling.”
Cyrenians works with 11,000 people and could fill they are creating via the WiSH fund ten times over. The Simon Community charity has a similar project running, again with 30 properties.
Hutton said: “There is a strong desire by the private sector to innovate, to use investments to achieve social outcomes. But we simply don’t have the money nor the time, nor the space to build social housing at the level that we need.
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“That means we need to reprovision what we’ve got, whether that’s empty homes, whether it’s council stock that is sitting empty because there are renovations that need to be done. We should put cash into making them habitable again, fast.
“We also need to continue to kind of push the local authorities and government around investment and social housing, whether that’s purchasing homes or building them, whatever it takes to get things moving faster.”
The Cyrenians’ 30 properties are a mix of family homes and one-beds and will house around 200 women and their children experiencing homelessness.
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The fund is jointly managed by social impact investment company Resonance, a leader in homelessness property funds in the UK, and Patron Capital, the pan-European institutional investor focused on property-backed investments.
The fund buys and refurbishes properties across the UK and then leases them to the fund’s expert housing partners, who rent the homes to women at risk of homelessness with a secure tenancy.
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