About us

This gives you a brief introduction to SHiP, who we are and what we do. If you want to find out more visit the events page to find a meeting near you or get in touch.

Who we are

SHiP is a membership organisation of 55+ supported housing developing and owning Housing Associations across the country and has been running for over 30 years. SHiP became a Limited Company in 2011 and is managed by a voluntary Management Committee.

Our origins were to bring together the large London based Registered Providers (RPs) to adopt some consistency in the management of supported housing across the capital, but our remit has extended geographically with national providers including members from the Midlands and North who hold their own regional group. Some members provide only agency managed supported housing while others provide both directly managed and agency managed services. SHiP members manages in excess of 30,000 units of supported housing stock across its members, meaning our reach and influence across the sector is significant.

Who are our members

You can see a list of members on our membership page but as you can see our members include the G15 Housing Associations but also specialist and local providers.

What we do

SHiP is largely a self-supporting, pro-active group that meets regularly to share good practice, offer peer support, discuss current issues and develop consistent ways of working.  SHiP employs a 'Coordinator' (currently shared by Wendy Green and Sue Baxter), who provide a service to the groups, co-ordinate meetings, manage actions and organise the training and the conference.

SHiP was established 30+ years ago when supported housing was an emerging sector and has since grown into a well-respected voice in its own right, often cited or consulted on key issues by national bodies. 

We work closely with membership/trade bodies such as the National Housing Federation, Homeless Link (and formerly Sitra), and with government departments such as DLUHC, DWP and LGA. We are in regular dialogue with DLUHC on the current Renters Reform Bill, influencing its content, and the Oversight and Scrutiny (SHROA) legislation. We were an active member of DLUHC’s ‘Supported Housing and Covid’ group, we continue discussions and work with NHF and HMRC on VAT in supported housing.

Our focus is Housing Management, but our work straddles wider issues of support, care and commissioning, including capital and revenue funding issues; our activity covers both directly managed and agency managed supported housing issues.   

The ‘SHiP Monitoring Toolkit’ that SHiP designed many years ago has become a recognised sector standard. This is a robust Quality Assurance approach that ensures the housing management service delivered by managing agents on behalf of the RP is of a good quality and reflects the regulatory duties that the RP must adhere to. It can also be used in-house to self-audit.  Amongst other things we facilitate a number of meetings for members in the form of general meetings, meeting for members who are responsible for agency managed schemes plus a specialist meeting for members in the north and midlands. We have resources on our website and commission training as directed by our members. Not least we provide a forum for members to network with other members of staff who work in supported housing.

Notable achievements

SHiP holds a very popular and successful annual conference much quoted as “the most relevant conference I attend”.  We are proud that SHiP achieved its conference across the last 4 years - 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, despite the pandemic.  We are back to normal now and our next conference is 19th/20th September in London Docklands.  The SHiP Conference is a members’ only event.

SHiP's recent work includes