Examination of Witnesses (Questions 263-279)
MAJOR IAN
HARRIS, MR
NIGEL PARRINGTON,
MR PAUL
CAVADINO AND
MR NICK
O'SHEA
7 DECEMBER 2004
Q263 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the
second session this morning and ask you to identify yourselves
for the record, please.
Major Harris: I am Major Ian Harris,
and I am the Territorial Director for Social Work for The Salvation
Army.
Mr Parrington: I am Nigel Parrington
and I am the Chief Executive of The Salvation Army Housing Association.
Mr Cavadino: Paul Cavadino, Chief
Executive of Nacro, the crime reduction charity.
Mr O'Shea: I am Nick O'Shea, Director
of Development for the Revolving Doors Agency.
Q264 Chairman: Well, before we go to
questions, do any of you want to say anything by way of introduction
or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?
Major Harris: Perhaps I could
just mention that we are very grateful for the opportunity of
contributing to this Committee. The Salvation Army is large and
it offers very diverse services in the United Kingdom and in southern
Ireland. In the field of homelessness, we have 50 residential
centres offering 3,000 beds each night. My colleague, Mr Parrington,
who is the Chief Executive of The Salvation Army Housing Association,
which is the registered social landlord and our preferred tenant,
together we provide services for in excess of 7,000 people a year.
Q265 Chairman: Thank you very much. Anyone
else?
Mr Cavadino: Perhaps I could briefly
mention the position, in particular, of people in prison. About
a third of the people who go into prison had no home before they
went in. Another third have had accommodation, but lose it as
a result of serving a prison sentence. That means that the issue
of homelessness when prisoners are released is a significant one
in its size. It is also related to public safety because the evidence
shows, even on the most conservative estimates, that somebody
who is released with settled accommodation has a likelihood of
reoffending which is cut by a fifth, and there are some studies
which put the impact as much greater than that. For example, one
study indicated that those released from prison with settled accommodation
had a likelihood of reoffending less than half that of similar
offenders who were released homeless. It is an issue of homelessness
but it is also an important issue in relation to crime reduction.
Q266 Mr Cummings: All of you work with
people who have alcohol and mental health problems. Do you believe
their specialist needs can ever be met under the mainstream, or
should separate specialist services be established? Should responsibility
for coordinating these programmes be handed over to the voluntary
sector?
Major Harris: We are dealing with
very complex and multiple needs here. To identify individual substance
misuse, whether that be alcohol or drug and mental health issues,
is very difficult, it is a partnership approach and I do not think
it is something that should be handed over to the voluntary sector.
It is something that we have to work together on and when we do
work together well we work together for the benefit of the people
that seek our services.
Q267 Mr Cummings: How do you believe
that could be achieved?
Major Harris: My experience locally
is that this is really when our people get working together with
other social providers in partnership, it is when we work closely
with local authorities and it is when we work with primary
medical facilities and psychiatric facilities.
Mr O'Shea: I would agree. 65%
of our clients who have mental health problems or multiple needs
require being linked in with six or more services and the key
piece of learning from our work has not been about providing a
new service that will just work with these people in isolation,
it is actually about linking them to some very good services,
which it is doing at the moment, it is about getting them to engage
with them.
Mr Cavadino: There are some excellent
individual services. For example, we run a number of accommodation
services in partnerships with specialist drugs rehabilitation
agencies where we provide housing and housing support and the
drugs rehabilitation agency will provide the specialist rehabilitation
programme for our tenants. What needs to happen is co-ordination
by the statutory agencies. What I would like to see is a greater
planned involvement of and partnership with the voluntary sector
rather than handing the whole thing over.
Major Harris: Perhaps I could
give you an example of something that is working in our experience,
which is the Cardiff Bus project. It is an initiative of the Welsh
Assembly, it is headed up by The Salvation Army, but it is using
all the main contributors to services. It is a bus that operates
during the day and through the evening as well and it provides
really diverse services. It includes medical referrals, it includes
psychiatric services, it includes point of contact services as
well as referrals on and it appears to be working very well.
Mr Parrington: Do you want another
example?
Q268 Mr Cummings: Yes please.
Mr Parrington: In terms of The
Salvation Army, which obviously is the largest voluntary organisation
in this country, we undertook a pilot in St Helens where we had
potential areas of low demand and we had a series of failed tenancies
and people not sustaining their tenancy. As a result of combining
support and people funding we were able to supply housing support
workers to provide additional support to residents moving from
homes into general needs accommodation, but with the voluntary
support of The Salvation Army they were able to provide community
support at weekends and emotional support to people that would
not have occurred unless we had that particular link. I think
it is important to emphasise that it is a combination of partnerships
between the statutory and voluntary sectors.
Q269 Mr Cummings: Mr O'Shea, I understand
you have a Link Worker scheme to facilitate multi-agency working,
and a Multi Agency Review Framework to help local agencies improve
their inter-agency co-ordination. Are you aware of any similar
initiatives run by local authorities?
Mr O'Shea: I would say there is
huge variation between local authorities. Islington is a good
example where they have many multi-agency panels which come through
right from the very serious offenders through to the more low
level offenders and as we have worked in Islington the panels
that we have set up have become less needed because there are
others taking over, but it is very variable. There are other authorities
where we work where there is not that kind of work at all and
there is no desire for that to happen.
Q270 Mr Cummings: Why do you think that
is?
Mr O'Shea: I do not have a statistical
answer as to why that is, but I think it is about priorities.
Different places have different priorities for what they want
to do. Offenders with mental health problems and who take drugs
are not people's priority in every case. If you have got a big
problem with families or victims of domestic violence, they are
going to be your priorities and it comes down to joint interpretation,
but I do not have statistics to back that up.
Q271 Mr Cummings: So you do not think
it is a matter of cash but a matter of perception?
Mr O'Shea: It is always a matter
of cash. It is about what you are going to use to prioritise that
money for so that everybody has roughly the same amount. In Islington,
for example, when you come out of prison you go straight into
a reception centre if you are homeless and then you go on from
there. In Ealing we have had significant difficulties trying to
house people because the resources are being employed elsewhere.
Q272 Christine Russell: Mr Cavadino,
you gave us interesting statistics at the beginning about ex-offenders
and the fact that one-third have no homes when they go into prison
and one-third lose their homes during the course of their stay
in prison. What are the differences between short stay and long
stay prisoners in terms of challenges and what should the Home
Office be doing about the problem?
Mr Cavadino: Two-thirds of the
people who are sentenced to prison each year are sentenced for
under 12 months. Most of the people who go in and out of prison
are short-term prisoners, but a short prison sentence can still
mean that you lose your accommodation.
Q273 Christine Russell: I thought Housing
Benefit was paid for some of the period.
Mr Cavadino: If you are going
to be in custody for 13 weeks or less on a sentence then you can
have Housing Benefit paid to cover that period. That assumes,
of course, that you are clued up enough to claim. That is why
it is particularly important that one of the recommendations in
our written memorandum, namely that all prisons should have a
housing advice service available to all prisoners who need it,
should be implemented as soon as possible. It is part of the Government's
longer-term aims in their Reducing Reoffending National Action
Plan, but it needs to happen as rapidly as possible. If you have
a housing advice service it means that as soon as somebody goes
into prison you can interview them, assess their housing need
and, where it is possible, keep their accommodation open for them
during a short sentence, contact the local authority, make the
Housing Benefit arrangements, surrender the tenancy promptly so
that the prisoner does not build up arrears through not doing
that which will rule him or her out of being rehoused and those
arrangements can be facilitated greatly if there is somebody who
can advise the prisoner and make those arrangements as rapidly
as possible.
Q274 Christine Russell: That is probably
easier to achieve where you have a local authority or a housing
association as a landlord. Would there not be particular problems
if the prisoner was in private rented accommodation?
Mr Cavadino: Yes, there are particular
problems. One of the problems is the fact that if the landlord
is not prepared to rehouse that prisoner even under the arrangements
that I have just set out then the prisoner, if he or she is going
to go back into the private rented sector, will then face a series
of obvious problems related to the fact that they have no money
on release. If rent in advance is required then it may be possible
to achieve that through the Social Fund, if a loan can be achieved
for that purpose, but you cannot normally get that kind of assistance
for a deposit and many landlords require a deposit. There are
a number of rent guarantee schemes or bond schemes for deposits
which operate well and one of the key things that would help released
prisoners to be housed more readily in the private sector would
be an extension of those schemes.
Mr O'Shea: I want to come back
quickly to the 13 week rule. I was one of the co-writers of the
national rehabilitation strategy that Paul alluded to at the Home
Office and one of the big problems we have is that when you go
into prison for more than 13 weeks you lose your Housing Benefit
instantly, but it does not cover the notice period of four to
six weeks that you would have on any tenancy and so you automatically
end up with rental arrears which then bar you from housing. That
was one of the things that we really tried very hard to change
when we were negotiating that strategy and we were unable to do
so.
Mr Cavadino: That is now changing
and it will be possible in the future for Housing Benefit to cover
the notice period.
Q275 Christine Russell: I want to move
on to pick up something that you put in your report, Mr O'Shea,
where you pointed out the fact that in the last two years local
authorities have only rehoused about 250 ex-prisoners.
Mr O'Shea: It is under the amendment
to the Homelessness Act, yes.
Q276 Christine Russell: Surely you accept
that it is very difficult for a local housing authority or indeed
a housing association to justify rehousing ex-prisoners ahead
of people who have perhaps been on a waiting list for months or
even years in many cases?
Mr O'Shea: Yes, I agree. In one
borough there are people who have been on the waiting lists since
1969. I think that is then about whether you make something a
priority and you stick with it or you do not. This amendment has
been made and the hope was that it would make people a priority
and it has not because intentionality and vulnerability are still
being read very differently.
Q277 Christine Russell: Should there
be a quota system for each housing provider?
Mr O'Shea: That is one way of
prioritising. If you are going to make somebody a priority then
the resources have to be there to make it happen. Invariably the
local authorities are sitting there saying, "I don't agree
with that and I'm not going to do it." It is very much about
saying I have got ten houses and I have got 50 people, what are
we going to do?
Mr Cavadino: It is our very strong
impression that the readiness to classify a release prisoner as
vulnerable and the readiness to classify them as being "intentionally"
homeless because they committed an offence vary according to the
amount of housing stock that local authorities have available.
The threshold for that goes up and down almost in proportion to
the amount of available housing stock and that is understandable.
In Wales where the definition is much tighter, ie if you are released
from an institution you are one of the priority categories without
having to pass an additional threshold of vulnerability, the position
is much clearer cut. I would ideally like to see that extended
to England. If that does not happen then we need a tighter definition
of vulnerability because it varies so much and that would, among
other things, involve looking clearly at the sorts of categories
that would increase your likelihood of being classified as vulnerable
anyway, such as mental illness, but it would also mean looking
at the need for help with addictions. People who are released
without support from family and friends could reasonably be regarded
as more vulnerable than those who have that kind of support. Some
tighter definition in the guidance at least would help.
Q278 Christine Russell: You would obviously
support elements of the support actually starting long before
release to help the person perhaps have a greater chance of retaining
dependency?
Major Harris: We recognise the
tensions of local authorities in having to prioritise the priorities
because of scarce resources and that goes right the way through
the whole sector.
Q279 Chris Mole: How could it ever be
that people with mental health problems or learning disabilities
are not regarded as vulnerable when making homelessness applications,
or is it the same sort of situation as you were just describing,
ie the thresholds go up and down with the availability of housing?
Major Harris: Yes, I think that
is exactly it. People with mental health issues affecting their
lives are seen in different ways. Some of those are identified
medically or in different ways, but what it does is it affects
their ability to live independently, successfully, to sustain
tenancies and to sustain independent living. It is the services
that need to back people whatever their needs, particularly those
with mental health issues and multiple issues, that needs to be
in place to be able to help that long-term independence be achieved.
Mr O'Shea: You must be able to
demonstrate that you have a severe enough mental health problem
in order to be considered vulnerable which means getting an up-to-date
current diagnosis. Someone made the point about people who are
vulnerable losing their identification and losing everything.
If that was the least of their problems then that would be fine.
It is very difficult to get, for example, a diagnosis from a prison
or even evidence of what medication you have been on and yet the
burden of proof is on you. If you cannot go to the housing office
with all that information and so on they will not house you.
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