Why are there so many unnecessary housing placement endings? Ben Howarth, founder and director of Howarth Housing Group, looks at the reasons behind this burning issue and what local authorities can do to avoid it.
There is a burning need to avoid unnecessary housing placement endings as demand for housing increases due to the rise in homelessness rates in England. This has seen the number of people living in temporary accommodation in England hitting a 25-year high. However, housing placements can end for a variety of reasons and tackling them is key to ensuring a high success rate for housing placements.
Yet some housing organisations have a significantly lower rate of placement endings than any other comparable organisations. Why is this? Here are some of the various methods local authorities can use to achieve lower rates of placement endings.
Use detailed, dynamic risk assessments
Local authorities have to conduct a needs assessment on people requesting homelessness placements, which cover a wide range of considerations. While risk level is part of the needs assessment, it is quite often not properly explored.
Quite often there will be third-party services involved, such as social services, probation, or community mental health teams. But beyond collecting the basic information, it is less common for local authorities to directly contact the person to either confirm the information they have been provided or seek further information to ensure that the risk assessment has been completed properly.
This often results in a poor-quality risk assessment that then leads to issues during placement that could have potentially been mitigated or avoided completely. Thus, a more robust framework needs to be developed to ensure that every local authority is carrying out full and proper risk assessments.
Money management advice for every client
One of the main reasons for presenting as homeless to local authorities is due to debt – usually rent, council tax and utility arrears. However, when people are placed in purely temporary accommodation, they are usually provided no money management support.
Due to the client being in temporary accommodation, these debts tend to get ignored as the creditors cannot find the individual. However, when they are provided with a move-on property, they tend to be found, and debt collection continues. This can lead to clients re-presenting as homeless due to continuing debts.
Therefore, local authorities should offer money management to clients at the earliest opportunity to help avoid this type of situation.
Quality support and advice 24/7
The majority of local authorities don’t have the resources to provide any form of real support – it is often left to third-party services or supported accommodation providers. However, they are under increasing strain due to the requirement to provide better quality services while simultaneously having payments continually challenged and cut. This leads to more and more re-presentations and providers failing.
Local authorities should ensure tenants can access support from staff any time of day. To do this, each resident should be allocated a key worker that they will work directly with, regardless of whether they are in a supported accommodation project or a temporary accommodation project.
The support worker will work with the tenant for their entire stay so that if any tenant is going through a crisis or has serious problems, they can access the necessary support when they need it.
Quality, self-contained accommodation
Placing clients in self-contained properties, having undergone thorough risk management and safeguarding procedures, allows tenants to experience a sense of normality in their time of need.
Moving clients into permanent residences is the end goal for everyone; however, it needs to be done properly with a good amount of consideration for the person’s ability to manage their own property. Allowing them the opportunity to familiarise themselves with domestic life again in a supported environment can drastically reduce the number of reoccurring homelessness.
A personalised approach to client needs
Ideally, every person presenting as homeless would have a bespoke support package tailored to them; however, in today’s climate of cost-cutting measures, this is simply not possible. This often results in an attempt to develop a one-size-fits-all model, which doesn’t really work for anyone.
Local authorities need to allow supported accommodation providers the freedom to develop individual programs that fit the individual needs rather than following the black-and-white of the housing benefit regulations on what support should look like. Most housing benefit departments have no real knowledge of what day-to-day support looks like and, as such, often reject claims for ‘lack of support’ due to following their own opinions rather than following any specific guidance.
Overall, the personal approach is the most effective way to avoid unnecessary housing placement endings and local authorities should consider implementing the advice above to achieve this.
