Charity Wins London Homelessness Award

Look Ahead Housing and Care has been presented with the first prize in the Andy Ludlow Homelessness Award 2006 at a special ceremony organised by London Councils. The housing charity’s Customer Involvement Programme – based in Kensington and Chelsea – saw off the challenge of five other short listed projects to collect the £10,000 top prize. The award ceremony was addressed by keynote speaker the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Ruth Kelly MP, making her first speech on homelessness since taking up her position.

Look Ahead Housing and Care received its prize from Channel 4 presenter Amanda Lamb, at a ceremony at the London Design Museum. It becomes the eighth winner of the annual Andy Ludlow Homelessness Awards. The awards are organised by London Councils to highlight good practice and innovative ways of tackling and reducing homelessness across the capital. They are supported by Shelter, London Housing Foundation and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

Look Ahead Housing and Care provide temporary accommodation for homeless people through 72 supported housing projects, including hostels in Aldgate Victoria, Earls Court and Bayswater. The Customer Involvement Programme provides homeless people with training to enable them to become active participants in shaping and developing Look Ahead’s service. The skills they learn are also designed to help them improve their quality of life through finding work and a permanent home. Around 100 people have benefited from the project since it started 18 months ago, and Look Ahead hopes 200 more will be able to gain from the training scheme over the next year.

The organisation plans to use the £10,000 prize money to pay for an external evaluation of the scheme and help towards publishing a good practice guide to help others benefit from their experience.

Look Ahead’s Housing and Care’s customer service manager Marcus Winter said: “We are delighted to have won this prestigious award. All of our customers need some form of support. For any customer involvement programme to be real and meaningful you need to provide your customers with the skills and confidence to become involved on an equal footing. This project isn’t about paying lip service to our customers’ needs, but it is about empowering them.”

Three projects received £5,000 each after being named as runners up. They were:

• Cardboard Citizens – This Way Up. This is the largest multi-arts based programme of its kind, providing 750 homeless people a year with weekly workshops in circus skills, dance, music writing and theatre. The project is based in Tower Hamlets
• East Thames – Working Future. East Thames use the Government funding it receives to reduce the rents for temporary accommodation leased from the private sector and for providing training to help people find work. The project is based in Newham
• Single Homeless Project – Newham Offender Floating Support. This project works with offenders with a background of substance misuse. It aims to help these people achieve and sustain independent living. The project is based in Newham.

Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Ruth Kelly said: “I am delighted that my Department is a co-sponsor of the Awards. For the past seven years they have played an important part in recognising excellence in innovation and good practice among projects tackling homelessness, here in London. They are projects that have really made a difference to people’s lives, on the ground where it matters, and have helped us to be so successful in tackling the very worst forms of homelessness, like rough sleeping and the long-term use of B+B’s for families with children. I look forward to working with groups like these in helping us to reach the challenging aims we have set ourselves, like halving the number of households in temporary accommodation by 2010.”

London Councils housing chair Cllr Jamie Carswell said: “There were some fantastic examples of innovative projects that are working to tackle the challenge of homelessness in London head-on. I am delighted by the commitment that is being shown by a wide range of organisations to break down the barriers faced by homeless people in trying to make a better life for themselves. It was a difficult task to pick a winner from six excellent projects, but I think the innovative work by Look Ahead makes them worthy winners.”

The Andy Ludlow Homelessness Awards were established in 1999 as a memorial to the late director of housing and social services in LB Haringey.

This year’s awards were held a month before the 40th anniversary of the screening of Cathy Come Home, the BBC1 drama on the effects of homelessness.