At the end of September 2025 there were 1,229 households in temporary accommodation in Coventry, including 889 households with children and 2,014 children. The autumn 2025 rough sleeping snapshot recorded 29 people, the highest figure in the city’s published series. There were 10,859 households on the Coventry Homefinder register at 31 March 2026, and the council’s homelessness service takes around 120 enquiries a week.
If you are the person holding a case against that backdrop, the difficulty is not finding a bed somewhere. It is finding one where the placement holds — where your client is still housed in three months and you are not managing the same case again in six weeks.
This page is for the people making those placements. It sets out what we provide, what makes a placement last, and how to refer.
What we provide
Our properties are shared accommodation, normally two to four bedrooms. Each resident has their own room and shares the kitchen and bathroom with a small number of other people. Every house is:
- Fully furnished, so a resident can move in the same day without having to find furniture
- Inclusive of all bills — gas, electricity and water are covered, so there are no utility accounts for a resident to set up, fall behind on, or be cut off from
- Available with no deposit. A service charge applies and the amount depends on the property, but there is nothing for a resident to find up front
Those three things remove most of the practical barriers that stop a placement happening on the day you need it to happen. Nobody is waiting on a deposit, a white goods delivery or a utility account before they have a bed.
Where we fit in Coventry’s current arrangements
From April 2026 Coventry City Council has commissioned its housing-related support through a new framework worth around £14.76 million, running to March 2028 with the option to extend. The lots were awarded to P3 for temporary accommodation support and for families, The Salvation Army for complex needs among the over-25s including people leaving prison, St Basils for under-25s, and Turnaround West Midlands CIC for women.
We are an accommodation provider, not a commissioned support provider. In practice that means we work alongside those organisations rather than in competition with them: they hold the support, we hold the housing, and the placement works when both are properly joined up. If you are a support provider under that framework and you need accommodation to place into, that is exactly the conversation we want to have.
The standard Coventry expects, and what it means for you
Coventry publishes a Guide to Standards for Supported (Exempt) Accommodation, and providers are expected to meet it to be recognised by the council and its partners. It runs to 49 measures across referrals and allocations, safeguarding and risk, support, anti-social behaviour, health and safety, resources and workforce.
The requirements that matter most to a referrer are:
- A face-to-face meeting with the resident before anything is signed
- A named safeguarding officer
- SMART support plans, reviewed properly rather than filed
- A minimum of three hours of support per resident per week for housing benefit purposes
- Out-of-hours contact and named support workers
- Fair distribution of properties across the city rather than clustering
- Full health and safety compliance — HHSRS, HMO management, gas safety, alarms, EPC, EICR, fire risk assessments, asbestos and legionella policies
Coventry’s Exempt Accommodation Team audits every provider at least once a year, and what the audit finds feeds directly into housing benefit value-for-money decisions. There is a monthly provider panel, and providers are expected to use the Pre-Eviction Panel where a resident is at risk of losing their accommodation.
If you are weighing up providers, those are the right questions to ask all of us. We are happy to talk through our position on any of them.
Who refers to us
We work alongside registered providers and housing associations, and take referrals from:
- Coventry City Council’s Homelessness Advice Service and Rough Sleeping Outreach
- The Coventry Youth Hub, for single people and couples aged 16 to 24 without children
- Public authorities using the Duty to Refer under section 213B of the Housing Act 1996
- Commissioned support providers working under the council’s housing-related support framework
- Probation, and providers delivering the Community Accommodation Service Tier 3 (CAS3), which funds up to 84 nights for eligible prison leavers from the first night of release
- Mental health teams and hospital discharge coordinators
- Domestic abuse services
- Asylum move-on and resettlement support services
- Drug and alcohol treatment services
- Care leaver and transition teams
Tell us everything, and we will give you a straight answer
We assess every referral on its own facts, against the specific house and the people already living in it. What we need from you is the complete picture — risk history, previous evictions, arrears, conditions attached, support that is in place and support that is not.
We would far rather have the whole picture and say no than have half of it and say yes to a placement that fails. A refusal costs you a phone call. A failed placement costs your client their accommodation, and it makes the next one harder to arrange. If we cannot hold a placement, we will tell you quickly and tell you why.
Five things that decide whether a placement holds
None of these are complicated. All of them get skipped when a placement is made at four o’clock on a Friday.
1. The risk picture is complete
The most common cause of early breakdown is a referral where something was left out — usually because the referrer feared that full disclosure meant a refusal. It is the single most expensive thing that can go wrong, and it is entirely avoidable.
2. The person has seen the place
Someone moved into a house they have never visited, in a part of Coventry they do not know, away from their support network, will frequently be gone inside a month. Coventry’s own standards require a face-to-face meeting before signing, and there is a good reason for it. Where it can be arranged, we want the person to see the room and meet whoever manages the property first.
3. Support starts the day the tenancy does
Transitional housing only works when accommodation and support arrive together. Where support is still being arranged at the point of placement, the first fortnight is when things come apart — benefit claim unmade, first appointment missed, arrears beginning.
Tell us who is providing support, how often, and who we contact when something changes. If it is not in place yet, say so and we will agree a realistic start date rather than taking the placement and hoping.
4. Housing benefit is settled before the move, not after
Where accommodation is provided with care, support or supervision by a registered provider, housing costs are generally met through Housing Benefit rather than the Universal Credit housing element. Coventry scrutinises these claims closely — the council tests whether charges are eligible, whether service and intensive housing management charges are reasonable, and whether core rent is excessive against comparable accommodation.
Because our properties are fully furnished and include all bills, there are no separate utility arrears building up alongside the rent, which is one of the quieter reasons placements fail elsewhere. Our guide to exempt accommodation and who it is for explains how the benefit position works.
5. There is a move-on plan at the point of referral
Transitional accommodation without a move-on plan becomes permanent accommodation by default, in housing that was never designed for it — and with 10,859 households on the Homefinder register, move-on is not quick.
Tell us at referral what the intended next step is — Coventry Homefinder, private rented, return to family, a different level of support — and roughly when. It shapes how the placement is set up from day one.
A note on HMO controls in Coventry
Coventry’s Article 4 Direction has been in force since 30 September 2023 across eleven wards — Cheylesmore, Earlsdon, Foleshill, Lower Stoke, Radford, St Michael’s, Sherbourne, Upper Stoke, Wainbody, Westwood and Whoberley. Within those wards, converting a family home into a small HMO requires planning permission. Additional HMO licensing runs citywide from 4 May 2025 to 3 May 2030, and the HMO Development Plan Document was adopted in March 2025.
The practical consequence for referrers is that well-managed existing provision in Coventry is becoming scarcer rather than more plentiful. Relationships with providers who intend to stay in the market are worth building now.
How to refer
Email us at [email protected] or call 0203 370 6999 and we will take the referral from there. Please have the following ready, because it lets us give you an answer rather than a holding reply:
- The support needs and the risk assessment, in full
- The benefit position, and whether a claim is already in place
- Who is providing support, how often, and the named contact
- The intended move-on route and a rough timescale
- Any conditions attached to the placement
If your client would rather make contact themselves, they can fill in the application form on our Tenants page.
Working with us
MKM Housing Ltd has provided shared and supported accommodation since 2020, operating across Birmingham, Coventry and Stoke-on-Trent alongside registered provider partners. Read more about us, or get in touch.
Sources: MHCLG statutory homelessness statistics for July to September 2025, as compiled by the West Midlands Combined Authority; MHCLG rough sleeping snapshot, autumn 2025; Coventry City Council Homefinder register FOI response, August 2026; Coventry City Council Guide to Standards for Supported (Exempt) Accommodation; Coventry City Council Housing Related Support Services contract award, November 2025; Coventry City Council HMO licensing and Article 4 pages.
