Supporting People and the iceberg

It is designed to cut costs and, in so doing, it threatens ongoing sheltered housing provision and prevents improvements to existing schemes.

The Supporting People budget is cash-limited and was based on figures provided by social landlords in 2002. It is assumed those figures were correct. However, we are repeatedly told by different councils that administer the budget that no real increase can take place year on year, apart from a percentage for inflation. If this is correct, it has enormous implications.

It cannot take account of associations with variable service charges (these are based on actual costs that fluctuate year on year). No allowance is made for renewal, for example, future improvement in call systems. No staff regrading or improvement of pay and conditions can take place, nor does it allow for incremental pay rises. There is no allowance for new sheltered housing schemes to be developed in the future.

If that weren’t serious enough, the existing situation is intolerable. Elderly tenants are asked to be responsible for rent payments, which they understand. However, this is made up of three elements: housing benefit, usually paid direct to the landlord; non-eligible service charges, which they have to pay themselves; and a new term called Supporting People, which covers the care element within housing costs.

Supporting People does not synchronise with housing benefit and is a duplicated system with frequent inaccuracies.

To make matters worse, elderly residents could be interviewed by an inspection team and be expected to fully understand the difference between housing benefit and Supporting People. If they have exercised their right to disclaim daily attendance from a warden (some see this as overly intrusive), an element of the funding may be withdrawn, threatening the existence of residential staff, often seen as friends.

Soon, inspections will be undertaken by local authority finance “police” whose mandate is to reduce costs and obtain value for money. In order to assess this, comparable costs will be taken from other sheltered housing providers who can supply a service that is cheaper but not necessarily better. We will end up with the lowest denominator, not excellence, which our elderly tenants deserve.

Chaotic administration problems have followed the introduction of Supporting People. Each tenant now has two accounts instead of one. There are two sections in the local authority to deal with instead of one.

Taking legal proceedings for arrears on sheltered housing schemes will be almost impossible as it will be too difficult to ascertain what element of arrears exists and for what purpose.

If, as I suspect, there is a need for social landlords to be able to prove the efficient running of their sheltered housing schemes is good value for money, surely this could be something covered in our annual returns.

The Audit Commission could then use this as one of the indices that it reports on during inspections.

I feel the social landlord sector is steaming ahead in its unsinkable ship called “Sheltered housing” and the inspection iceberg is just around the corner.

Jeff Windsor, Stanningley, Leeds