End of our Winter Night Shelter season: Frontline insights Glass Door Homeless Charity has been operating emergency winter night shelters for over 20 years. We run the UK's largest network of open access winter night shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Open access means that no matter who you are or where you come from, you can turn to us for support. We launched our emergency night shelter service on Monday 4th November 2024, offering 105 spaces per night across three night shelter circuits – one in Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Wandsworth. The 6th of April 2025 marked the closing of our night shelters until next winter. Our caseworkers will continue to support shelter guests that engaged with our year-round casework service. Each circuit offered up to 35 people a safe place to sleep each night, as well as a hot dinner and breakfast the next morning, and access to our casework service to help guests build a route out of homelessness. Our shelters were operated by shelter staff and 840 volunteers, as well as our year-round Casework and Operations Team, allowing us to deliver our shelter provision seven days a week in each of the three rotating circuits over the last five months. For the second year running, our shelters were split between a mixed-gender circuit, men’s circuit and women’s circuit, and we also held a weekly women’s drop-in casework session to support our women’s shelter guests. We will share more in-depth analysis of the data and insight we collected from our shelter provision in the coming months, but here is a quick overview of our 2024-25 night shelter season: We received 1,658 referrals 570 people stayed in the shelters, of whom: 352 were men and 215 were women (62% men, 38% women) 84% were previously sleeping rough The youngest was 18 and the oldest 79 41% were under the age of 35 (4% aged 18-21, 37% aged 22-34) 30% were aged 35-49 29% were aged 50+ 30% were from the UK, 16% Eritrean, 5% Polish, 5% Sudanese, 2% French The average stay was 24.7 nights Although the rise of homelessness in London, continued cost-of-living crisis and the ever-growing challenge to find affordable and quality housing in London puts great pressure on our caseworkers, we’re celebrating these positive outcomes: 395 (69%) of guests who stayed in the shelters engaged with caseworkers 126 guests have been moved to more permanent housing so far: 67 women, 58 men, 1 non-binary 19 guests have been connected with health services 50 guests have received financial support 69% of women referred to our shelters preferred to be in a single-gender shelter, showing the value of adding a women’s shelter for the second year running. Although shelters have closed, our year-round casework team will continue to support the 395 guests who engaged to build their route out of homelessness. Due to increased demand, we had to close our men’s shelter referrals twice this season – once in December and for a second time in January. Year after year, we are unable to meet the true demand for shelter in London despite providing emergency shelter for hundreds of people every winter. Additionally, temperature drops led to the Greater London Authority to trigger its Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) three times this winter, which led us to activate our own Emergency Cold Weather Policy on three separate occasions (which means we increased our shelter capacity to up to 40 people each night for each circuit) to ensure more people could stay warm and safe inside during freezing weather conditions. You can read our previous blogs from one month, two months, three months and four months into the shelters, to see how the season progressed. Find out more about our shelters by watching our recent shelter film, bringing together members of the Glass Door team and some of our incredible volunteers to offer you a sneak peek into our night shelters: Manage Cookie Preferences
