Supported Housing – What Really Changes?

One of the changes on the public sector horizon concerns the supported housing world. Housing associations and other social landlords have been able to claim additional housing management costs for vulnerable tenants: or rather, tenants have been able to claim these costs through housing benefit to reflect the greater management input from landlords by nature of their vulnerability. These are distinguished from the costs of any support and/or care they may receive to generally assist in the maintenance of their independence in the community. These services may or may not be delivered by the social landlord’s staff, depending on the particular local commissioning arrangements.

These support services are commissioned through local or health authorities, and the Government has now decided that from 2019 an amount equivalent to that which is paid at present through housing benefit for intensive housing management will be distributed to local authorities to add to the commissioning pot for supported housing. Leaving aside the detail of the transitional arrangements, what is the likely outcome of such a shift? There will obviously be winners and losers in this new world: but how will the individual consumer of the service benefit?

The Government argues that local authorities are best placed to make judgements about need and quality, and the best service providers. However, at present a provider can receive a payment for an individual through the benefit system for the housing component of the work. Not all vulnerable people need the additional component of commissioned care and support, so an immediate question is whether or not the new arrangements can reflect this diversity of need? It will probably depend on how personalised the new commissioning shapes up.

Then there is the issue of how system rules change over time. Local authorities are always struggling to reconcile conflicting priorities, which of course can be subject to local political whims. There will always be the temptation to shift money between budgets when ring-fences are withdrawn, as happened with the Supporting People initiative that in 2003 replaced the myriad of previous funding streams from individual government departments. ‘Freedom and flexibilities’ granted to local government at the beginning of this decade meant less ‘popular’ client groups could be sacrificed to the more ‘deserving’. The pressure on social care is one such example of shifting priorities and resources, and is becoming more so as the population ages.

The debate on impacts and transitional protections are just starting. As always collaboration will be essential within the wider parameters of managing this change but there is a danger given the fetish of austerity that choices will be made by competition. This got me thinking back to the type of structures and arrangements that were in place for developing and managing supported housing when I started working in the sector back at the beginning of the 1980s, and how the new arrangements have a distinctly familiar ring. A phrase from T.S. Elliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ came to mind: “Men learn little from one generation to the next, but never in the life of one man does the same time return”.

In those halcyon days the Housing Corporation dispensed something called ‘Hostel Deficit Grant’ (HDG) to cover the additional housing costs in accommodating vulnerable people. It was paid as part of regional strategies to meet Government priorities for different client groups, and then ‘topped up’ by other Government department grants to meet their own objectives for specific groups. (These were the grants, referred to above, that became combined into Supporting People grant.) So for example, work with offenders was covered by ‘Probation After-Care grant’, originally put in place in the 1960s after pressure by NACRO and other campaign organisations to deal with the intractable problem of offenders being discharged as homeless from prison. (Funny, in T.S. Elliot prediction, we seem to be back to square one on this one!)

During the 1980s I was part of an initiative that did make significant progress in tackling the homelessness issue of discharged prisoners. The key to success was an independent collaborative structure called the Devon Consultative Group, initiated by voluntary housing projects taking offenders, NACRO, and the Probation Service, but pulling in housing associations, local authorities, health and employment providers, and private landlords. The aim was simple: to reduce the number of offenders becoming homeless and improve the effectiveness and quality of their resettlement outcomes. These were shared objectives that influenced and guided the spending and service management decisions of each constituent organisation; the Group did not have a separate commissioning pot. The Probation Service paid for the secretariat and development officer function.

In this way a housing association’s decision to develop a supported housing project for offenders and apply for HDG as well as the capital money was done in the knowledge that it had the Group’s strategic and operational support, and that the Probation Service would apply for the necessary top-up funds. In less than 10 years over 500 new bedspaces for offenders were developed in Devon, and local authority and other data showed a decline in the problems related homelessness.

In my mind one of the major merits of the Devon Consultative Group was its independence as a structure from any one constituent organisation: but in a very powerful way it served to create one strategic and operational narrative for a vulnerable client group in the community, helping to set priorities and create social result, and drawing its authority from each individual stakeholder organisation. Whatever the funding system we are custodians of in the future, and whatever resources Government allocate to the task of housing vulnerable people, we must ensure that, as never in the life of one man does the same time return, it serves the needs of the vulnerable in a fair and equitable way to maximise social result.