Ange’s Housing Blog October 2025

By Ange Rochford-Briggs, Social Housing Strategy & Partnerships Lead

It’s been a varied and busy month, during in the first weeks I met with partners at Torus and St Leger Homes to develop detailed case studies of their work to tackle furniture poverty. Both have fantastic, comprehensive schemes that make a huge difference to their customers and are a real credit to them as landlords. Look out for those being published on our website soon! 

Claire Donovan and I were glad to be welcomed along to Birmingham Housing Partnership’s over 55s group meeting to discuss our work this month too. Our research indicates that older people are more likely than any other age category to find themselves in ‘deep furniture poverty’ (missing 3 or more essential items) and it was a great opportunity to raise awareness amongst professionals working closely with this group.  

I was pleased to be invited to our sister charity FRC’s Northeast depot to see furniture poverty being tackled first hand. This depot serves local authority and housing association clients and their tenants throughout the region, delivering via various schemes. Hearing the team share their experiences of helping people was both heart-warming and a stark reminder of how important tackling furniture poverty is. I also wanted to share a photo, (left), of the team enjoying a well-deserved spot of team building!

Looking ahead to next month, we are delighted to be planning some partnership work with the Chartered Institute of Housing, who continue to be very supportive of our work and I am looking forward to sharing more details next time.  

We are also delighted to be working alongside Zoe Franklin MP for Guildford and her team to arrange a Furniture Poverty roundtable aimed at bringing social landlords in her constituency together. We’ve already had a fantastic response from local housing leaders and are looking forward to what we hope will be a fantastic and worthwhile event.  

As ever, thanks to Fusion21 Foundation for their ongoing support for our work and I am here to help so if you would like to talk about how I can support you to explore furniture provision, or if you are already delivering a scheme and would like to share your experiences and expertise with the sector, do get in touch.

See you next month!