What We Do

We are housing experts, here to help the people of Bristol and beyond navigate the path to a safe and secure home.

Established in 1965, we give clients the advice, support, and advocacy they need to escape or avoid homelessness and find long-term stability.

We have a strong focus on areas of high socio-economic deprivation.

We believe that housing is a human right, and we fight tirelessly for everyone to have a safe, secure home.

Our Housing Advice Service

We provide:

Brief advice – an adviser may be able to resolve an issue fairly quickly via our helpline.
Long-term casework – we support many clients for several months – sometimes years – until we achieve the best possible outcome for them.
Outreach work – we’ve built strong partnerships with other local agencies, delivering support in locations around Bristol to reach people who may not otherwise find us.

The most common issue we support clients with is homelessness. This could be in the form of rough sleeping, sofa-surfing, or living in a hostel, B&B, night shelter, or temporary accommodation.

Other clients may be struggling because of overcrowding, extreme disrepair, eviction threats, landlord disputes, domestic abuse, or race-based hate crime.

As well as directly supporting clients, we also influence local housing policy, amplifying the voices of those who are bearing the brunt of the housing crisis at policy debates and decision-making forums.

Why we are needed

Bristol’s housing stock is increasingly dominated by the private rented sector, and it is now the second most expensive UK city to rent in.

21,000 households are currently on the waiting list for social housing, and with only 1,500 properties available to allocate each year, demand far outweighs supply.

Post-pandemic, the number of households in temporary accommodation has more than doubled to 1,200, and at least 70 people are rough sleeping on any one night.

Even people who urgently need to move as they are classed as homeless, or at risk of significant harm now wait 2-3 years to be rehoused into social housing.

Although more ‘affordable homes’ are being built, the benefits of this are largely wiped out by increasing poverty rates and the legacy of the ‘Right to Buy’ policy.

Bristol City Council has indicated that 42% of their tenants are now in some form of rent arrears.

The number of Section 21 evictions jumped up a staggering 76% last year compared to the previous year, leaving thousands of families facing homelessness.

In these challenging times, where demand for crisis services and housing outstrips supply, our aim wherever possible is to prevent homelessness through early intervention, and to rehouse those who have already fallen into homelessness.

Our clients

We support people from many different backgrounds, including disabled people and their carers, refugees, single parents, and people leaving care, prison or rehab with little support.

A lot of our clients face extra barriers when it comes to accessing good quality housing and housing support, such as language barriers, poverty, poor mental health and discrimination.

Housing and immigration

Housing Matters has now registered with the Office of Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC).

This means we can now give Level 1 immigration advice to clients whose immigration status is affecting their housing situation.

Who we can help

We may be able to help you if your housing situation is being affected by the following immigration issues:

You have no recourse to public funds (when you are unable to claim welfare benefits because of your immigration status);
You are ineligible for homelessness assistance (when a local authority will not provide temporary accommodation because of your immigration status).

Our Quality of Service

At Housing Matters we work as hard as we can to ensure that we can provide free, independent and confidential advice to every person we work with. We make sure that we treat everyone help with equal fairness and respect, and we hope to ensure that our service is there for everyone in housing need living in Bristol and the surrounding areas.

To find out more about the kind of service you can expect from Housing Matters, please download our client care leaflet. It’s in our old branding for the moment, but the information is up to date.

Cient-Care-Leaflet