Ikea backs Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign

Why is a home-furnishing retailer backing a campaign for new social housing and why did it get involved in a partnership with Shelter?

“We’re a home-furnishing retailer, we are a business at the end of the day, but the heart of everything we do is about making a house a home, and that your home underpins everything else,” Ms Jenkins says.

“As we were doing more and more research coming out of COVID and looking again at the landscape and what social issues people were faced with, we were quite horrified to find out that last year [almost] 400 households a day were becoming homeless in the UK alone.”

For Ikea, that meant looking for a different kind of charity partnership. Ms Jenkins says she was keen to build something beyond traditional “charity of the year” models. “We wanted to stand for something and really find a partner that could fit our ambitions to give more people access to better homes.”

After lengthy discussions, the partnership with Shelter was born. As mentioned, it started with the ambition to create systemic change “to address the housing emergency”. Among other things, this will involve training Ikea workers to become “life-at-home experts”, with a view to helping people in precarious housing situations understand their rights.

“We wanted to stand for something and really find a partner that could fit our ambitions to give more people access to better homes”

Ikea will fund housing-rights workers in Shelter advice hubs and there are plans to create an online learning platform to inform people of their rights. The partners have also committed to a three-year research project following the journeys of families living in social housing and the ill effects on families of living in temporary accommodation (although the details of this have not yet been finalised). The intention is to use this to call for systemic change.

The training should benefit both staff and communities, Ms Jenkins says.

“We’re a living-wage employer, we really do look after our co-workers,” she says. “But, of course, [the housing crisis] is going to be an issue that faces co-workers or the friends and family of our co-workers. In developing the partnership, we realised this will be a great resource to educate, empower and upskill our co-workers with the knowledge they need to navigate their housing rights.”

One of the goals of the partnership is for many more social homes to be built in the UK, but what other measures of success will there be? For Ms Jenkins, it starts with raising awareness. She admits she has been on a journey herself since Ikea, which builds affordable homes through BoKlok, a company jointly owned with Skanska, started researching the issue.

“I feel clued up and educated on social issues, but I had been horrified about how little I knew about this issue, in a country I’ve lived in for 15 years. So, when we talk about temporary accommodation, when we talk about hidden homelessness, what I think success would look like would be putting a spotlight on this issue for consumers, whether it is for our customers or our co-workers, but getting people to know [more widely] what the real issue is here.

“Through no fault of their own, people are forced into these incredibly difficult situations. Almost half of the people who are homeless in the UK are children.”

A lack of awareness among the general population about the scale of the problem can lead to stigma and shame for homeless families, she adds. “I think we all feel that the one thing we’d like to change is public perception of the issue.”

“Through no fault of their own, people are forced into these incredibly difficult situations. Almost half of the people who are homeless in the UK are children”

While the partnership is still developing, earlier this year Ikea and Shelter installed something they called ‘Real Life Roomsets’ in four stores across the UK. The roomsets were based on real stories of people living in temporary accommodation local to the stores that took part (London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol). At the time, the aim was to highlight “the cramped, dangerous and grotty spaces that an increasing number of people who are experiencing homelessness are forced to experience when living in temporary accommodation”.

To raise further awareness, Ms Jenkins says one of the roomsets will be installed at this year’s Labour Party Conference, but she admits the rooms only paint a partial picture.

“You might see the room and think, ‘That’s quite stark’,” she says. “But would you know that you had to travel an hour-and-a-half to get your kids to school? Both ways. Would you know that you had to sign in every night, otherwise you would lose that temporary accommodation? So there’d be no respite, no camping trip or visiting a friend or a relative.”

Then there are the heart-wrenching questions families in temporary accommodation wrestle with every day. “For a single mum working hard – how do you work and get your kids to school? How do you cook a healthy meal? Where do you let your kids play, do homework?”

The ultimate ambition is to effect change. This is something Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign is also looking to do. “Ikea definitely wants to add their voice to support the campaign,” Ms Jenkins says, but she takes issue with the use of one term: temporary accommodation.

“I almost hate to use that term,” she adds. “Because I think we all know it’s not very temporary a lot of the time.”