Severe Weather Emergency Protocol and extended cold weather provision

This good practice guide is to support local authorities and agencies provide appropriate responses to homeless people during the cold and severe weather period. Local areas should have enough adequate provision to prevent rough sleeping at any time of year. However, the cold weather period provides different opportunities for engaging with entrenched rough sleepers and hard-to-reach groups and increased support is often available. Therefore this guide has two aims:

1. To ensure that no one dies on the streets due to cold weather.
2. To ensure that every effort is made to engage with individuals during the cold weather period so they do not return to the streets.

This guide will help you to establish whether your local area requires a severe weather emergency protocol (SWEP) only as a method to engage rough sleepers or whether you could benefit from more robust extended cold weather provision. It should also support you to develop good practice in areas such as risk, assessment and working in partnership with other agencies. You can also find tools to help you monitor SWEP and extended cold weather provision here.

Webinar:

Please watch a recording of our 'Severe Weather Emergency Protocol and Extended Cold Weather Provision' webinar, held on 10th October, 2011.