In-House Team of the Year: Shelter

Shelter’s public affairs team has had an outstanding year. Rather than just focusing on tactics and policy we have concentrated on overcoming political barriers to produce winning campaign strategies.

As we enter a General Election year, all the major parties have placed housing at the centre of their offer to voters. This is demonstrably a result of Shelter’s work. Staff development has focused on understanding the electoral dynamics of the next election. We have encouraged the parties to adopt housing policies that will benefit Shelter’s clients, by proving how popular these policies will be with the general public. We regularly commission voter attitude research to highlight to politicians the electoral value of housing. And we use tailored messaging and high-level events to demonstrate this to politicians and political influencers. This included a series of private dinners at this year’s party conferences, which reached out beyond traditional housing policy stakeholders to party advisors, pollsters and election strategists. Corporate partnerships with organisations such as KPMG and British Gas have added a strong credible voice to our work – and ensure value for money.

We routinely use local analysis to tailor our communications by highlighting the impact of high housing costs in marginal constituencies. Where appropriate, we share a platform with other housing organisations in order to improve the sector’s collective voice. Over the past 15 months we have first, pushed housing up the political agenda. And second, provided the policy content when politicians have reached for answers. Our approach has ensured that public clamour and political awareness is always followed by concrete solutions.

We have consistently achieved against our main targets for the year, including:

Position housing to be a leading issue for the 2015 general election – Housing has become a key political battleground in the past year, manifested in several major government announcements and high prominence in the leaders’ speeches at party conference, particularly the Prime Minister’s.

All three major parties are now competing to be the party of ‘home ownership’- and they clearly understand that this must be linked to the supply of new homes.

The government prohibits ‘revenge eviction’ in the private rented sector – Shelter led a campaign which resulted in Sarah Teather MP using her private members bill to tackle this issue. Thanks to our work, this bill was put forward with cross-party support. We then engaged a diverse range of other organisations – from Citizens Advice to the Mayor of London – to demonstrate both the workability and the popularity of this measure. The government announcing their support for the bill in September 2014.

One political party adopts policy in support of banning letting agency fees – In May 2014, Ed Miliband announced that a future Labour government would ban letting fees. Shelter worked with renters and landlords to make a well evidenced case for change. We used polling, case studies and a petition to clearly demonstrate that this policy was a vote winner. Not only did this influence Labour, it forced the government to respond by introducing fee transparency.