The cost of supporting people

For our elderly tenants, I can see no benefit whatsoever in Supporting People. We have about 200 sheltered flats and it is costing us at least £300 a month in additional staff time just to try to account for the Supporting People payments.

Over the five months since Supporting People payments started, five of our tenants have, sadly, passed away. Each change has been reported two or three times to the local authority concerned, but we are still being given Supporting People payments for them.

And who on earth at the ODPM had the barmy idea of trendy return forms with vast swathes of purple colour? Very pretty, I'm sure, but quite obviously the civil service culture does not have to consider the cost of the printer ink for this at £30 a cartridge retail. We do. Nor do we have the luxury of a computer systems manager to edit these forms.

This may all be symptomatic of why our rent rates are well below the proposed new rent restructuring levels that I and my board have refused to accept. Why should our tenants pick up increases of 5% a year for 10 years? Their pensions will never see such increases. More than half our tenants are not on housing benefits at all, and would have to fund the increase themselves out of small military pensions.

In fact, why should our elderly tenants pick up the costs of administering the Supporting People scheme at all?

The government is merely shifting its own bureaucratic administration costs on to them in the guise of improvements.