Calling for flooring in all social housing for Furnishing Futures

Furnishing Futures is a charity working with survivors of domestic abuse to create fully-furnished healing homes that feel safe and comfortable, giving those survivors and their families an opportunity to rebuild their lives. One of the major challenges they identified is a lack of flooring in the social houses they’re working in. Without flooring, tenants, especially domestic abuse survivors, are impacted emotionally, physically and financially and cannot call their house a home.

Claremont partnered with Furnishing Futures to better understand who they should be working with and to create a specific call to action that could realistically be achieved among decision-makers working in social housing.

We discovered some brilliant ‘bright spot’ housing associations who’d made the decision to go beyond standard practice and provide flooring to all tenants. We interviewed those organisations to see what barriers they’d faced before making that change. They cited external challenges around funding and other pressing priorities like damp and mould. 

Internally they talked about teams (and their budgets) being siloed, preventing joined up thinking around tenants’ needs. We then held a roundtable to discuss possible solutions. There was agreement that the imperative for change comes from the strategic vision – putting customer needs at the heart of everything.

We also ran a co-design group with women who’d survived domestic abuse and been placed in social housing that had no floors. We developed a shared narrative to describe the experience that they and others in their situation have been through to strengthen Furnishing Futures’ argument for change.