Severe weather provision for rough sleepers – is it working?

GMLC Campaign Volunteer Neryssa Martins Luz summarises the Museum of Homelessness’ new 2026 report into Severe Weather homelessness provision (SWEP). The full report is available here.

The Museum of Homelessness (MoH) is a charity created and run by people with direct experience of homelessness. MoH set out to investigate severe weather provision for homeless people after the heatwave in 2022, and to remedy the lack of information and data on local authority responses for climate emergency and homelessness. They monitored deaths of people experiencing homelessness and found that climate change and heat played a significant part.

The purpose behind the ‘Severe Weather Emergency’ investigations is to evaluate the effectiveness of a measure councils should activate in extreme weather conditions – Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) provision.

In this report, MoH collected data from councils for August 2022 to July 2024 and compared it to their first edition report containing data from 2020 – 2022. They sent Freedom of Information requests to 91 Local Authorities across England and Wales, and in these requests, asked questions designed to offer insights into the quality of each local authority’s SWEP offer, the safety and accessibility of the offer, the broadness of the response, and the barriers people face in accessing SWEP in their area.

 

Findings

Overall

MoH found:

• In 2020-2022, 26% of the councils in the study did not activate SWEP, or were unable to provide SWEP protocol, dates, information about the offer or on the number of people assisted. For the 2022-2024 data, this number fell to 13%, suggesting more Councils are measuring their SWEP provision and responding to severe weather.
• 66 councils offered follow-on support through continuing to offer bedspaces beyond the SWEP period, compared to the previous set of findings, where only 45 councils did this.
• 30% of councils could not say how many people they had assisted. A few major towns and cities responded to MoH with a lack of SWEP provision or an inability to provide any information.
• The number of SWEP activations and days SWEP provision was active has dropped. In 2021-2022 there were 578 SWEP activations and for 2,411 days, compared to 2023-2024 where there were only 262 SWEP activations and for 1,917 days. MoH found evidence that the post-Covid shift away from communal night shelters to self-contained accommodation put pressure on how councils activate SWEP.
• 33% of councils had not introduced new provision or changes in response to climate emergency. Some council responses contained significant omissions, a lack of detail, limited evidence of comprehensive provisions and/or evidence that the council has exclusionary verification processes.
• In their last report, MoH called for ‘short-burst’ SWEP to be reduced as they found between 2020 and 2022 50 of the 91 councils had done this. This has dropped substantially to 15 out of 91 councils as of 2022-2024.

 

Quality of Offer

MoH found:

• 42% of surveyed councils had some kind of verification system or could not prove that they had a humanitarian offer at times of extreme weather, which indicated to the MoH that there was significant evidence of “gatekeeping” in SWEP responses. Many councils would provide barriers to SWEP such as making the ‘offer’ conditional and one time only, and having a starting assumption that people may not be ‘genuinely rough sleeping’. In GMLC’s experience, Manchester City Council is one of the local authorities which has a verification process for rough sleepers, with homeless people asked to report their location and wait there for hours to be verified. Some of our clients have reported being refused help until they were verified, then never receiving a visit following attempts to be verified on repeated occasions.
• There was evidence that councils would not offer SWEP placements if the person potentially had another form of accommodation, overlooking safety.
• Councils refer to the involvement of mental health services when an individual refuses a SWEP offer. This included mental health screening and questioning processes, but there was no evidence of councils questioning whether the offer was appropriate to a person’s needs, setting a worrying precedent.
• At least 11 councils operate ‘sit-up services’, including Manchester. This can mean having people sleep on plastic chairs with bright lights on all night, which MoH consider is not an appropriate offer for SWEP.

MoH have been a partner to The Simon Community since their founding. They are a charity that runs community houses and street work in London, and they have shared their thoughts into the findings of this report. They added:

• The outreach comes too late at night and people are woken up in the early hours of the morning to be taken somewhere else for just a few hours.
• The temperature alone is not a good enough assessment for whether SWEP should be triggered, with the ‘feel like’ indicator being more important.
• Connecting with SWEP is risky, as it means that to benefit from SWEP, people must weigh up the benefits of being visible to authorities against being too cold.
• The accommodation can be unsuitable, requiring significant travel times to reach, or risks of flooding.
• There is often an insensitive approach to SWEP, with a philosophy of ‘something is better than nothing’. For people who live outside, if their first experience of these services is problematic or disruptive, then they may choose to stay outside in future despite its risks.

 

Why is SWEP accommodation refused?

Through MoH’s own SWEP response, they have found 8 top reasons why a SWEP offer would be refused:

1. Bad quality provision unlikely to provide respite
2. Travel distance, and no consideration to how people will return
3. Not worth it for one night
4. Too disruptive to routine
5. Safety concerns
6. Concern about losing belongings or sleep sites
7. Conditionality of offers
8. Lack of trust in services

 

Extreme wind, heat and rain

MoH have found:

• 57% of councils are implementing new measures in relation to extreme weather.
• 90% of activations were for cold weather, neglecting hot weather. Only 6% of individuals recorded being assisted during summer months.
• Heat SWEP activations overall were slightly lower than in the previous study. However, mitigating factors were identified as 2024 was the coolest summer since 2015.
• There was positive evidence that local authorities have considered their local needs, as well as geography and topography (such as in locations with high winds) and have been defining specific risks related to different types of extreme weather, and that they were following the government’s standardised processes around heat alerts.

 

Communication of SWEP offers

• There has been an increase in the number of councils not mentioning SWEP on their websites, with 37% in 2020-2022 and 48% in this latest investigation.
• MoH noted multiple areas where councils could be more robust, consistent, and clear with their SWEP messaging to take accountability and inform the public.

 

Recommendations and Tools

MoH lists a number of recommendations to improve the process of SWEP provision:

• SWEP should be made a statutory duty;
• Short term SWEP should be discontinued;
• The ‘In for Good’ principle should be applied (the principle under which once a person is supported to access shelter or accommodation, they are not asked to leave until there is a support plan in place);
• SWEP must be unconditional and properly trauma conscious;
• Verification systems should not be used to determine who can get a SWEP offer;
• Unhoused people should be included in the design of SWEP offers;
• SWEP should be included in all climate mitigation plans by the government;
• SWEP should be expanded to include heatwaves and extreme rainfall;
• Grassroots and non-commissioned groups should be included in SWEP communications;
• StreetLink should be discontinued (StreetLink is a website, mobile app and phone line in England and Wales that enables the public to alert local authorities about individuals sleeping rough. On their website here, MoH highlight issues with StreetLink, including its 9% success rate and the fact that it ignores the consent of the rough sleeper when members of the public report people to StreetLink, which has particular risks for domestic violence survivors, for example).

MoH encourages councils and services to refer to a checklist to ensure their SWEP offers match up with what people need. This includes the following factors:

• Quality of the offer
• Location of the offer
• Length of time offered
• Disruption to routine
• Safety
• Belongings
• Conditionality
• Trust

In summary, given the effects of climate change continue to contribute to increased flooding, more intense heat in summer, unpredictable weather patterns, and a greater number of people fleeing climate breakdown abroad coming to the UK for safety, local authorities should improve their SWEP services, rather than introducing greater gatekeeping or a poorer offer to save costs. SWEP should be properly funded and designed, with input from homeless people, and try to provide a real path out of homelessness.