Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-171)
MS JANICE
SAMUELS, MS
JANICE BENNETT,
MS JULIE
WATSON AND
MS FIONA
GOODFELLOW
30 NOVEMBER 2004
Q160 Christine Russell: In order to get
them a tenancy?
Ms Bennett: Yes.
Ms Goodfellow: You have to realise
that they cannot provide accommodation and that is a big issue.
That is for the applicant who feels they are just being shunted
between two organisations[10].
Q161 Christine Russell: But with the
increasing pressures on social service departments to become children's
protection departments or whatever, do you find they perhaps downgrade
the attention they have given in the past to homeless families?
Ms Watson: I think there can be
a tendency to want to have somebody else to look after that side
of things if they possibly can.
Q162 Mr Betts: Right-to-buy applications
are going up. Is it causing difficulties now in terms of the availability
of stock to house homeless families and has anything been done
about it in terms of replacing the stock that is lost with other
forms of accommodation?
Ms Bennett: Obviously, we are
an LSVT local authority. It is now 11 years since we transferred
the stock. We were formerly a new town as well. They transferred
the stock ten years before. Both the new town ex-tenants and the
stock transfer tenants will have been tenants in the past on that,
and we do understand that there are still right-to-buyers even
on the old new town stock and there is certainly an increase in
right-to-buy on the RSL stock in the borough. We are down now
to less than 5,000 in the whole of the borough.
Q163 Chairman: Less than 5,000 from what
sort of figure?
Ms Bennett: Probably in the pre-days
between the local authority and the new town there would have
been about 8,000-9,000. It is probably about half of what it was
10 or 15 years ago and it is family accommodation. The new town
built family accommodation for workers to come and work at Leyland
Trucks and other things like that which is very much family accommodation.
We have no high rise blocks and we have no blocks of flats. We
have a few flats over shops.
Ms Samuels: Salford mirrors that.
When I wrote the initial evidence to the inquiry our right-to-buy
rate was 60 properties a month. That has now gone up to 70-plus
a month. Again, it is mainly family accommodation that is coming
out and accommodation that is on the more high demand estates
within the local authority. In terms of numbers, because we do
have 20,000-odd public sector properties, it is the family stock
that is coming out and that is having an impact on the housing
register and the amount of family accommodation that is available.
Q164 Mr Betts: So there will be some
areas where somebody comes and you accept them as homeless but
they also need support from other members of their family and
in that area you have a position where there is no housing?
Ms Samuels: Yes, and what we have
found is that there has always been some sort of mythology within
the city that homeless people will want to go to the highest demand
areas of the city, but that is not the case. Homeless people want
to go back to the community they have been made homeless from,
wherever that community is within the city, because of all the
links. They might have children in school, they have got family
around who can give them support. The unfortunate thing is that
if they are made homeless from those higher demand areas in the
city they are going to have a significantly longer period of time
to wait to get a chance to go back into the community that they
want to live in.
Q165 Mr Betts: And there is no obvious
solution around?
Ms Samuels: For us in Salford
I suppose the main one will be, and it is not a short term solution,
that we are a housing market renewal pathfinder and there is a
definite understanding that there needs to be a planned provision
of affordable accommodation across the range and across the city
but that is very much in the future and in the meantime we have
got this issue of people wanting, quite rightly, to remain in
the community and yet we have not got the stock to be able to
do that.
Q166 Chairman: You have not got the stock
but down the road there are empty houses, are there not, so is
it not a question of a bit of imagination? Why can the council
not buy up some of those empty homes?
Ms Samuels: What we are planning
to do and what we are doing is that where there are housing market
renewal areas going on, and where those properties have been empty
we will take those properties back in and in the short term we
will use those properties for the housing of homeless families,
so that is one avenue that we are looking at. As we say, another
key for us is that there is a lot of private rented sector accommodation
around. We have an accredited landlord service in the city and
we want to make sure that we are using all the possible stock
that we have got around. It has caused us some issues in the short
term about people wanting to be in the area that they have been
made homeless from.
Q167 Mr Sanders: Would it be possible
to eradicate the use of bed and breakfast in your areas?
Ms Bennett: Why? If it is good
quality and is well managed it is a very useful source of temporary
accommodation for people. It was a deliberate choice of the council
after stock transfer to build purpose-built, very modern flats
to be used as temporary interim accommodation. Overall we built
31 of those flats. The idea at the time was that that was much
too many and probably some of them would be used to house young
people on a permanent basis, but in fact they are always full
in terms of temporary accommodation. You have to have a period
of time to do your homeless investigation so we do use bed and
breakfast for young people but we do inspections of the properties.
They are in Preston but we do it jointly with Preston and environmental
health officers go in regularly to check them. They are well managed,
there is 24-hour cover in them. No, they are not wonderful, but
they are self-contained rooms with their own doors. A good quality,
well managed bed and breakfast can be quite useful[11].
Q168 Mr Sanders: For single young people?
Ms Bennett: Yes.
Q169 Mr Sanders: What about other groups?
Ms Bennett: We by and large never
put families into them. We are able to deal with families within
our interim accommodation. We also as a local authority five years
ago built a women's refuge which provides us with 24 bed spaces.
About a third of all our homeless applicants are from women fleeing
domestic violence so we plugged that gap with a purpose-built,
state-of-the-art women's refuge, so obviously that helps us as
well and that gives the women and children support. There are
child workers, outreach workers and so on.
Q170 Chairman: How long do they tend
to stay in the refuge before they get rehoused?
Ms Bennett: Usually it is a maximum
of about 12 weeks now. Homeless families will have an offer usually
within nine weeks, so women could go in there for a couple of
days and then decide to return home, but usually within 12 weeks
they are rehoused anyway with support from the women's refuge
with outreach workers for a further three to six months.
Ms Samuels: In Salford we would
like to get back to our traditional non-use of bed and breakfast
accommodation. It is only in the last 18 months that we have had
to use it. Where we would need to use it we want it to be for
single people who we feel could cope quite well in what is unsupported
accommodation within Salford. We much prefer to use the temporary
supported accommodation provision that we have got, a fixed site
provision, so that we can make sure that everybody is getting
the services that go with the property as well. We have made significant
reductions in the amount of bed and breakfast that we have been
using over those six or seven weeks and that in the main has been
because we have put a significant amount of effort into moving
people into the homeless families project and doing a lot of work
with our PCT and social services around the site on support provision.
Still, one of our main objectives is not to be using bed and breakfast.
Where it is very useful is where people are homeless in an emergency.
For two or three nights they need to be somewhere and I think
it is appropriate that they are there.
Q171 Mr Sanders: What role has Supporting
People had in helping to provide services in your areas?
Ms Samuels: We work very closely
with Supporting People and we have reduced our homelessness strategy
at the same time that Supporting People were doing their shadow
Supporting People strategy. In some ways we are very well off.
We have a very developed, large, floating support service and
we also have some 300 bed spaces whose primary client group is
homeless people. We felt at the time that we did the strategies
that that was quite a lot of resources to use. What does concern
us is that we are looking at the moment at those very high need
services. We need intensive support because we have noticed an
increase in homeless presentations from people with complex issues,
often drug and alcohol related issues but also mental health issues.
You do not often get people who just come with one particular
need or issue. They come with a whole range of them. Our concern
is that with the Supporting People cuts in funding which we know
are coming it is very difficult to plan long term for services
to be able to adapt and be flexible when they do not know the
amount of funding that they are going to get long term, because
it is difficult for providers to be able to operate in that kind
of environment. Probably that has been the biggest problem we
have had around developing what was a very good foundation we
started off with in the city.
Ms Bennett: Two years before the
introduction of Supporting People we set up with Preston and Chorley
Borough Councils a central Lancashire floating support scheme
which is specifically to support people who are homeless at home
or in temporary accommodation for a few months and then into their
first tenancies, so we already had that up and running through
the housing corporation. That went into Supporting People. Until
two years ago our annual bed and breakfast budget was £3,000
a year and probably in any one year we had two, three or four
people that we placed in bed and breakfast. This year it is £27,000,
not big in money terms, but you can see what the increase has
meant to us as a local authority. We have probably between six
and eight single people in bed and breakfast now at any one time.
What we are doing is providing them with a floating support service
so they are not left on their own. We do have almost daily visits
from the floating support team and they are also encouraged and
helped to help themselves by looking at possibly other ways of
getting better accommodation quicker than they would if they were
waiting for the traditional route through the local authority
homeless route and being referred to an RSL partner. A lot of
that encouragement is going on.
Chairman: On that note, thank you very
much indeed for your evidence.
10 Homelessness per se is not a priority for Social
Services and this has led to difficulties in negotiating a satisfactory
solution for intentionally homeless households. Whilst the homeless
code of guidance says that referrals should be made in reality
there is little that Social Services do in response to this. They
do not have accommodation and unless there are child protection
issues they are reluctant to get involved. The problem is not
just at a local level but at regional and national level. The
housing and social services national agendas are not sufficiently
integrated and co-ordinated to produce a real improvement to the
well being of the homeless. There are big gaps and a lack of integration
with the homelessness, community care and Childrens Act legislation.
Ultimately this often means that the voluntary sector is left
to respond to the needs of homeless households and effective engagement
across the agencies would benefit all parties. South Ribble KEY
is seeking funding from Social Services for the services that
they are providing. Back
11
This increase in presentations has made placement in B&B
unavoidable but it is always the last option to be offered. It
is classed very much as a short-term, emergency option that is
not ideal. South Ribble is currently working with one of our partner
RSL's to provide alternative temporary accommodation to B&B
for single homeless people and families. The low turnover in RSL
stock and the impact of high rents in the private sector coupled
with the Housing Benefit threshold mean more temporary accommodation
is required than originally envisaged. Back
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