New benefit regime may cut funding for wardens

Housing campaign groups fear up to 120,000 older people living in sheltered housing face losing their wardens if the interim measures go ahead in April next year.

Social security secretary Alistair Darling has asked the social security advisory committee to consider the draft regulations, which pave the way for the controversial Supporting People regime in 2003.

The new transitional scheme would replace the current housing benefit system which covers tenants' counselling and support charges.

Civil servants hope it will allow them to establish grant levels for the long-term programme, which will merge several funding streams into a single pot, by collating crucial information on support costs.

Housing benefit officers will judge for themselves whether claims for additional support services are eligible once the transitional arrangement comes into effect in November.

But benefits experts fear tenants in some sheltered housing schemes could lose their wardens, or have to pay for them from their own pockets, because the wardens are providing more care services.

And by using a dated definition of sheltered housing, the scheme will not cover warden costs in schemes without a common room.

National Housing Federation policy officer Kathleen Boyle said: "We are anxious that schemes that have a non-resident warden but don't have a common room won't have the funding to keep the warden."

Age Concern director Sally Greengross said: "If the government really wants to support older people it should maintain the current system of paying housing benefit for warden services to people in sheltered housing."

However, the transitional scheme is expected to highlight such anomalies before the final regulations are imposed.

Chartered Institute of Housing policy and liaison officer Sam Lister said: "Where wardens are doing a little bit more, [government has] got to try and find a way within the regulations of writing that coverage in."