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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 61-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE
Tuesday 30 November 2004 CLLR ANGELA HARVEY, MR STEVE MOORE, CLLR TONY NEWMAN and MS GENEVIEVE MACKLIN MS JANICE SAMUELS, MS JANICE BENNETT, MS JULIE WATSON and MS FIONA GOODFELLOW
MS DIANE HENDERSON, MS HELEN WILLIAMS, MR JON ROSSER MR JOSH SUTTON, MR LES WILLIAMSON and MR RICHARD ADAMSON Evidence heard in Public Questions 75 - 216
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee on Tuesday 30 November 2004 Members present Andrew Bennett, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts Mr David Clelland Christine Russell Mr Adrian Sanders ________________ Memorandum submitted by the Association of London Government Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Councillor Angela Harvey, Cabinet Member, and Mr Steve Moore, Westminster City Council; and Councillor Tony Newman, Chairman, Housing Committee, and Ms Genevieve Macklin, Director of Housing Policy, Association for London Government, examined. Q75 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the Committee for the second session of evidence on homelessness, but before we start this session, can I just place on record my appreciation to all those people who helped us with our visit to Birmingham and gave us informal evidence while we were there. Can I now ask you to identify yourselves for the record? Cllr Harvey: Yes, I am Councillor Angela Harvey, Cabinet Member for Housing in the City of Westminster. My responsibilities also include rough sleeping. Mr Moore: My name is Steve Moore and I am the acting Chief Housing Officer of the City of Westminster. Cllr Newman: Councillor Tony Newman, Chair of Housing at the Association of London Government, Cabinet Member with housing responsibilities currently in the London Borough of Croydon and the Leader elected to Croydon Council. Ms Macklin: Genevieve Macklin, Director of Housing Policy at the Association of London Government. Q76 Chairman: Do any of you want to say anything by way of introduction? We have obviously had your written evidence, but if anyone wants to make a brief statement, please do. Cllr Harvey: Thank you, Chairman. No doubt many of you will think of Westminster as an affluent place and will question why we are here today to talk about homelessness, but the reality is that Westminster is a city of very mixed places. The recent Indices of Deprivation identified one of our neighbourhoods as the most deprived in London, and perhaps this was exaggerated by the Census undercount, but certainly more than half of our wards are more deprived than the national average, and two are among the ten per cent most deprived in England. We are also a very diverse city and we are proud that people from a range of backgrounds choose to make Westminster their home. About 30 per cent of our residents are from an ethnic minority group and just over half were born outside the UK. There are over 100 different first languages spoken by the pupils of Westminster's schools. Today there are three principal areas of concern that we would like to draw to the attention of this inquiry. Firstly, on homelessness, benefits and employment, where the current system of funding temporary accommodation creates a poverty trap for residents from which it is virtually impossible to escape, there is an alternative and we would propose a system which would not cost any more, but would provide an incentive for homeless people to work. Secondly, the local connection rules, as they currently stand, are difficult and make little sense in a transient place like London where we have a 25 per cent population change every year in Westminster. The move to sub-regional procurement of affordable housing and away from direct funding to local authorities and the advent of the Growth Areas make it more difficult to satisfy people's demands to be housed locally. Finally, on rough sleeping, the problem of rough sleeping is not going to go away and our message is that the Government's focus and funding need to be sustained. For every 15 people we help off the streets, another 14 arrive, and it is time to take even more and a greater sustained effort to manage the numbers down. The recent emergence of nationals from the EU Accession States sleeping rough on our streets is evidence that this is a constantly changing agenda, and I addressed a select committee of the Polish Parliament ten days ago to talk about the successful free movement of workers with the issues of support to rough sleeping in Westminster. Thank you, Chairman. Q77 Chairman: Thank you. Do you want to say anything? Cllr Newman: Yes, very briefly. London boroughs are working very closely together to address many of these pressures in London, but London does have 60 per cent of the nation's homeless households. I think some of the other key areas I am hoping we might move on to are the balance between what is known as 'key worker housing' vis-à-vis the needs of those who are the homeless households, the key impacts in terms of overcrowding in parts of London, and also just to prove that where London boroughs have had what has often been very limited and targeted funding from ODPM in terms of the Bed and Breakfast Strategy that saw children taken out of bed and breakfasts in London, and very welcome too, and homeless strategies, we can actually come up with effective solutions if we are working together as boroughs with the OPDM. Chairman: Thank you very much. Can I just emphasise that if you agree with each other, then please do not say anything more, and if you disagree, get in as quickly as you can. Q78 Mr Clelland: Given the resources available and the current planning regime, do you think the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister are being realistic when they say they hope to reduce or get homelessness under control by 2008? Mr Moore: Looking at our supply and demand patterns, we have about 5,500 people a year coming to us as homeless applicants, and we accept around 1,200 a year. Now, over the last three years, we have lost the investment that we were previously making of around £10 million a year in local social housing grant and that has cut our amount of new units coming through RSL investment by about half. We are currently seeing our temporary accommodation rising by around 200 a year, so that is people in temporary accommodation of 200 a year, despite over 80 per cent of our available units each year going to homeless households. So against that backdrop, unless there is a significant increase in the overall supply coming through, it is extremely difficult to see how we are going to be under control by 2008, and I think all the indicators would suggest that where we are at the moment is a rise in the temporary accommodation population going on into the foreseeable future. Q79 Mr Clelland: So what is your estimate of the situation in 2008? Will it be worse than it is now or better than it is now? Mr Moore: Certainly I would expect more people to be in temporary accommodation in 2008 than there are today. Ms Macklin: Can I just add to that that I would agree with that because in London as a whole temporary accommodation is going up by 5,000 per year, so it illustrates Westminster's issue at the more local level, and there is not sufficient supply to be able to counter that. In fact, the number of social rented units predicted in the London Housing Strategy is 5,500 per annum, but we have already received recent information which suggests that is going to be 800 units short of that target, so that means that the temporary accommodation problem is going to increase. I think there are ways in which we can address this issue, which are not just about putting more funding into new social rented supply, although that is welcome and that is what we need as well, but there are other measures which we submitted in our evidence, like the Better Value Investment Model, which is really about just using the large sums of money that already go into temporary accommodation in a different way and it actually has cost benefits and savings to government. There are also a number of other initiatives which will produce longer-term savings for government which help to increase the supply, so again the Better Value Investment Model will produce 40 per cent more housing by just using the same amount of money, but using it on permanent housing instead of temporary accommodation. I think that does require the DWP, the Treasury and ODPM working together and we would like to see initiatives like that coming through. Similarly, there is the Revenue Incentive Scheme, and Westminster has already mentioned the loss of local authority social housing grant, which was funding an additional 1,000 units in London. We have put forward a proposal at the ALG for high-demand authorities, which has already been defined by ODPM through the right-to-buy discount initiative, so in high-demand authorities, if an incentive is given to boroughs to use their usable receipts to help RSLs develop more housing, that is another cost-benefit analysis for government, so we do not just have to keep talking about more and more money going into new supply, but it is about better using existing money. Q80 Mr Clelland: But on the question of provision of new housing, Westminster have criticised the Government's concentration of new affordable housing in the Growth Areas, but is it realistic, indeed economic, to build new homes in central London given the land prices? Cllr Harvey: I would like to answer that in two ways. First of all, the new Growth Areas do not take into account the infrastructure costs and I think our own experience from the 1970s and 1980s when large estates were built and people went in in one go, it led to much more uncohesive, shall we say, communities than we would have wished. Therefore, by having a steady trickle where we can build, certainly our experience is that it develops more cohesive communities. As I say, the new Growth Areas do not take into account the costs of the infrastructure itself. Also people do want to live in central London and we have, through our affordable housing policy, working with private developers, produced over 1,000 new homes in the last five years, so there is a way of getting advantage within. Can I say that when the Gershon reforms come through, of course there will be some land available in central London and perhaps we might want to develop that thought further. Q81 Mr Clelland: Can I ask the ALG about choice-based letting schemes. Do you think that these will help or hinder the equivalent housing schemes? Cllr Newman: I think choice-based letting schemes are, where they work, a very positive thing indeed. I have a choice-based letting scheme in my own borough, Croydon, which was set up in partnership with Shelter, who worked on it with us. It has removed the old points scheme of allocating housing and this, in a borough, like London as a whole, where there is extreme housing pressure, is a much fairer system where people can see what type of property they might be applying for, how long they might have to wait if they want a property in a certain area, and if they are prepared to look at living in other parts of the borough, then that may reduce the time to wait for a property, but it seems a much more transparent and much more fair scheme. The challenge in London, some London boroughs now work on a sub-regional basis together and it is looking at how one can then move into cross-borough nominations. The ODPM are talking about, with the ALG and others, the possibility of sort of pan-London opportunities and that I think, in principle, is something the ALG can support, but only at a time when the supply has been addressed and we are a long, long way from there now because if you attempt to move into pan-London lettings when there is such a limited supply, you can to a degree address that on a borough level, but it will not work. We have seen how housing can be misused in London in terms of outfits like the BNP in Barking, Dagenham and other areas playing off people's fears around housing and choice-based schemes with wild allegations about who may or may not move into an area, and it is a very sensitive area and I think before getting much more ambitious than one or two well-working borough schemes in London, we need a lot more work on this in terms of how we are going to tackle it. It must be done, as I said, in relation to supply because, without sufficient supply, it simply will not have any credibility. Q82 Chairman: How many people are you actually housing in your local authority who are not homeless? Cllr Newman: Croydon is just above the average, I think. About 65 per cent of the people we house are homeless. Q83 Chairman: So it is a very small proportion of people coming off the ordinary housing list? Cllr Newman: Yes, and London boroughs as a whole, that average stands for London at approximately 65 per cent. Mr Moore: If I could add Westminster's figure, we are running at about 83 per cent this year and we were running at above 80 in the last five years, so a significant proportion of the overall available net stock goes to the homeless we are housing. Q84 Christine Russell: The question I wanted to ask you was that you mentioned a figure of housing and affordable homes that you provided overall in Westminster, but is that in a year? Cllr Harvey: That is over the last five years. Q85 Christine Russell: So what policy do you have with developers? Do you have a percentage where you say to developers, "Right, we want 25 per cent", or 50 per cent? What do you say to developers of housing schemes? Cllr Harvey: We say 30 per cent because the use of land in Westminster is very complicated with the commercial pressures and there are many other things that people can do with land in Westminster and make money out of it, so we had to make sure that we set a target which was achievable and we are very pleased with the results at 30 per cent. Q86 Christine Russell: And the developers are quite willing to cough up 30 per cent? Cllr Harvey: Well, it takes some negotiation with my colleagues in some cases, but we are getting 30 per cent. We had a recent case where we went higher than that, but that is untypical. Q87 Mr Sanders: The Government is investing an increasing proportion of funds in key worker housing and in low-cost home ownership schemes rather than general social housing provision. Is the balance of priorities right? Ms Macklin: I think we would say no, certainly from a London-wide ALG perspective. The point I was making earlier was that with the large number, with the disproportionate problem that London faces with 60,000-plus households in temporary accommodation and rising, 60,000-plus houses severely overcrowded and rising, the only way we can address that severe housing need is to provide affordable rented housing. Unfortunately, the supply of affordable rented housing has been dropping over a number of years and the target used to be about 75 per cent of the ADP-funded programme and it is now less than 50 per cent. I have mentioned already that there is a target in London now for 5,500 social rented units and that is already not going to be delivered. Now, if that happens, what we can see is that the temporary accommodation pressures are going to increase and the overcrowding problems are going to increase, so we would argue that more needs to be invested in social rented housing and there is a way to do that. For example, if you give a greater weighting to severe overcrowding in the distribution formula, that will help somebody to supply more social rented housing. We have also worked out that from the Spending Review announcement of the additional 10,000 homes nationwide, if London got 40 per cent of that, 4,000, and that is based on its backlog need and its emerging need, then those 4,000 homes would help to contribute towards the 50 per cent affordable target of 15,000 units across London in the Mayor's plan and in the London Housing Strategy, so it does mean more resources to London. Where London has the greatest proportion of the nation's problem, if we want to tackle those problems, then I think London is the place to do it. Mr Moore: Can I just support the ALG on that and say that we are as one on that particular issue. It is very difficult when we are dealing, as we are in Westminster, with such acute homelessness, particularly at the lowest level where we are talking about rough sleeping where people have absolutely no choice in some instances and we are having to help them from the streets, it is very difficult, as a housing professional, to look at the investment that we have now got coming through and think that key workers should be a high priority. Certainly in terms of the north London sub-region, the two-year programme we are currently in the midst of, over 52 per cent of those units are social rented and the rest are for key workers. The balance is not right, so it does need to get better. Cllr Harvey: In fact some of our fellow boroughs in the north region are finding it difficult to let people take up the key worker accommodation and people just are not taking it up. Q88 Mr Sanders: Given the pressures that you have got with an increasing proportion of social housing being let to homeless households, is this causing problems in creating mixed and sustainable communities on social housing estates? Cllr Newman: I think it is and coming back to the point we just made about the key worker investment, it is how we need to address this in the future and be careful that we are not putting people into what you might call too fixed a category, given an ever-growing list of who is and who is not a key worker and homeless households because, linked to training opportunities and linked to education opportunities, it should be that someone who is perhaps today a homeless household, in terms of their ability to train perhaps in further education or in a different career perhaps they then can be defined as a key worker. I think that by saying, "That block are key workers and these people are homeless", we do risk perhaps making some of the mistakes of the past. Just on that key worker point, there is clear evidence that there is not a take-up across London and it is very ill-defined. My own local paper recently carried a half-page advert which said, "Are you a key worker? Ring this number and get a house for £50,000". Well, most people in housing are still trying to work out the definition of a key worker, let alone readers of The Croydon Advertiser, so there is a lot more work that needs to be done on this. Clearly some housing for key public service workers is a reasonable aim, but the ever-expanding list of who is a key worker at the expense of those in immediate housing need, I think we need to keep this at the very least under a very thorough review indeed. Q89 Mr Sanders: Are you finding that the social housing landlords are reluctant to accept a high proportion of homeless households which are nominated by local authorities? Mr Moore: No. We have got very good links with our RSL landlords. We do not have any difficulty in putting people forward. We do have various support measures which support people coming forward if they have particular vulnerabilities or difficulties and we make those support services, with floating support, et cetera, available. Q90 Chairman: So the 83 per cent that you were saying is coming off the homeless list, that is the same whether it is going into your own stock or whether it is going into housing association stock? Mr Moore: Indeed. Ms Macklin: The problem here is that the overall lettings available have dropped by about 30 per cent in the last three- or four-year period. The supply and demand statistics show that the RSLs are accepting a higher proportion of homeless households. Nevertheless, they argue that they would prefer to have more economically active households in order to fulfil sustainable communities and the more mixed and balanced communities agenda, and they are requesting that boroughs work with them to develop local letting plans. That is fine, but again it comes back to the severe problems around the level of overcrowded and homeless households that need to be accommodated and, therefore, going back to the point that Councillor Tony Newman has made that we must be more holistic in our approach and we must make sure that we are not talking about homeless households as a category, but we have got to link it with other initiatives, like the Key Worker Initiative, with key worker housing for the homeless and existing social tenants and let's make them key workers so that they can become more economically active. Q91 Mr Betts: Because of the pressures of the existing system, do you think local authorities are now getting tougher about those they accept as homeless? Ms Macklin: There is no evidence to suggest that. It is a very kind of legal definition and acceptance that they have got to follow lots of legislation. I think what has happened is that the level of acceptance, the evidence shows, has remained pretty stable, or it has increased slightly, but not significantly. I think it would have increased more significantly but for the work that boroughs have been doing around prevention strategies and there has been some real success in that area. We carried out recent research at the ALG and the prevention strategies, particularly around rent deposit schemes and mediation for young people, 16- and 17-year-olds, have shown to be, very effective in terms of preventing, and, for example, the mediation services for young people have had an effect of almost 45 per cent in those young people who have been presenting themselves not then being accepted as homeless and alternative options there. Q92 Mr Betts: Are there tensions across the different boroughs because there are obviously different rates of acceptance? I understand that the figure for London as a whole is about 44 per cent of people who are presenting themselves are accepted as homeless and in priority need and in Westminster, for example, it is just 21 per cent which is less than half of the London average. Cllr Harvey: Well, Westminster is a very nice place to live. Of those we accept we break them into three parts and certainly about 25 per cent of those we accept have no connection with Westminster at all. As my colleague said, it is very focused and there is a strong local focus as to what we can do. There are legal requirements. Q93 Mr Betts: But why is your acceptance rate just half of that? Cllr Harvey: I think it is because more people apply who do not have the right to be housed under the social housing reference. Q94 Chairman: Do you have any information about the people you have refused? Do you know whether the people that you refused then applied to somewhere else as homeless and were accepted? That would illustrate your claim that Westminster is a nice place, so people apply first in Westminster rather than somewhere else. Mr Moore: There is evidence that people do represent elsewhere and they have no local connection. About a third of the people who come to us overall have absolutely no connection with anywhere and their movement is such that they have lived in so many different places that they do not actually form a local connection anywhere. Q95 Chairman: So you are tougher on them than other people? Mr Moore: Well, I think we apply the law and we apply it correctly. We obviously have finite resources and we want to make sure that those people who do get the benefit of the legislation are people who properly qualify, so we have a stringent gatekeeping policy, but a fair gatekeeping policy. Occasionally we are judicially reviewed and I have to say that most of the time our judicial reviews are upheld, but we work very closely with the local law centres, et cetera, in making sure that our decisions are transparent and people can see that they are fair, but yes, I do take the point that we have got a very good record on gatekeeping, but even allowing for that good record on gatekeeping, we still have a severe shortage overall in terms of supply. There is a complete disparity between demand and supply. Cllr Harvey: I wonder if I could continue with that. Of those accepted as homeless in the year to March 2004, less than half of them demonstrated a local connection to Westminster for more than three of the last five years, and a quarter of them demonstrated a local connection of only six months of the last twelve months, and, as I have already mentioned, 25 per cent, a quarter, had no local connection proved. I think that all of us here would like to talk about the local connection rule inasmuch as the money coming to us is no longer locally based, in fact it is shared, but we still have to house people within Westminster who wish to be housed within Westminster more than elsewhere and the money is going ---- Chairman: I think we will probably want to pursue the local connection a bit later on. Q96 Mr Clelland: Another way of tackling this problem is to prevent homelessness happening in the first place. Is there something about how the strategies which were introduced in the 2002 Homelessness Act are working out? Are they proving to help to resolve these problems? Ms Macklin: I think certainly homelessness strategies have helped. I think the whole policy around the kind of reduction in bed and breakfast targets for families and the development of local strategies has been very, very helpful to boroughs. There is still an analysis, some research that needs to be carried out because it is early days yet in terms of seeing the overall effect, but certainly the work that was done around prevention is proving to be successful in certain areas around certain prevention strategies and less successful in other areas, so it does depend on local markets. The three elements of prevention strategies that have worked best, as I mentioned earlier, are, firstly, the rent deposit scheme and that has cost-benefit measures coming out of it as well as help to reduce the number of acceptances and help prevent homelessness. Then the homeless visiting officers and mediation services for young people are very successful and I have already mentioned the success with the mediation for young people, and both of those in particular have cost benefits to them. Q97 Chairman: The rent deposit scheme, can you just very briefly explain that to me? Ms Macklin: It is where, usually in the private rented sector, the landlord will ask for as a deposit a month's rent in advance as well as the deposit, so the borough funds that perhaps up to £2,000 per household. Q98 Mr Sanders: Does it actually pay money to the landlord or does it hold it in trust? Ms Macklin: Some of the boroughs will do a kind of scheme where they do actually pay out the deposit and it is not returnable. Others, which is obviously more cost-effective, provide a rent guarantee service to the landlord. That scheme, the young persons mediation service and the visiting homeless officers are also working quite well. One that is not working so well is mediation for families and that is largely because of the supply issue where the highest percentage is for families and friends who are evicting existing occupants and that mediation service is not really working there and that is largely because there are too many people in the household and they need to be in another additional family unit, and that just reinforces the issue around overcrowding and the need for greater supply. Q99 Chairman: If you throw them out, they come to the head of the housing queue, do they not? Ms Macklin: Yes, absolutely, but what we are saying is that the prevention methods which have been introduced by local authorities to try and help families to accommodate them for a bit longer are less successful than the other prevention schemes, and that is because it is really a supply issue rather than something where you can help relationships work better, which works for 16- and 17-year-olds and other young people, but less well for families. Q100 Mr Clelland: The supply is uneven across London. Is this not something which is really too big an issue for the individual boroughs to deal with? Should this not be a GLA issue, the whole question of homelessness in London? Cllr Newman: I think there is a role for the GLA, but if you look at how well local borough homelessness strategies have worked, and the word "local" is key here because in boroughs of between 100,000 and 300,000 people, these are significant-sized places, having a local input into the local need I think is critical. The ALG and the GLA have worked together on some projects, and Notify is a project where information about those people who move into temporary accommodation in London is shared, and I think a balanced approach where it is right to have a London view and pan-London information with, I think, still the delivery focused at the local borough level has, I think, worked reasonably well. I think around some of these strategies is the concern of some of them that if you went pan-London with them, you would lose that connection with what is actually happening in local communities and lose the solutions and the answers as well, so I think there is a balance to be struck. Mr Moore: We do not believe that one size fits all. London is a very, very large city with lots of dynamics and lots of different requirements, and what fits residents in the centre of London is worlds apart from the leafy suburbs of Bromley in the south and Enfield in the north to the centre of London, Kensington and Chelsea, ourselves and Lambeth and Southwark, so I think the issue for us is that the GLA has a part to play clearly, as does the ALG, and we make sure that we tap into those resources and we make sure that we use any conduit that we can to further the aims that we have, but at the same time we do require local discretion. Cllr Harvey: If I can just add to that, I think that if we want to strengthen and make more cohesive our communities, to do it on the local borough basis will help enhance that rather than diminish it. Q101 Mr Sanders: Moving into Supporting People, there have been major cuts and increasing uncertainties in funding for the Supporting People programme. What has been the impact in providing services for the homeless in London? Ms Macklin: About 35 per cent of the Supporting People funding in London goes into homelessness projects, so it is a fairly high proportion and I think probably higher than anywhere else in the country, so the sort of reductions in the funding could potentially have significant issues. I think one of the things that the boroughs are grappling with at the moment is really the kind of timing of when the reviews of their strategies are taking place because with the uncertainty about how the funding will be distributed and the formula, it necessarily means when you develop a formulaic approach that some boroughs will lose and some boroughs will be better off, so they need time to be able to review what they are doing with their Supporting People services in order to be able to ensure that they can adjust their programmes and meet the needs and particularly those of homeless families. I think at the moment the issue that they are most concerned about is having sufficient time to be able to review those strategies and adjust them in order to take account of the funding changes that will happen. Mr Moore: We have about 50 per cent of our Supporting People grant going into our homelessness or associated funding streams, so clearly we have been hit quite hard, as other boroughs have, by the formulaic approach in terms of no increases for inflation and real cuts in percentages. The way we have dealt with those to date is to take a very hard-nosed look at all of the contracts that we have and actually impose reflective cuts in the amount that we are prepared to pay and shave some of the frills off the edges, if you like, in terms of the overall. Where we are now is that we are waiting for next year's grant announcement, any day now, we are told, which does not really give us a great lead-in time to the 1st April to actually put in place what we will need to make it fit, but quite clearly we are concerned with the sort of noises we are getting in terms of what may be the imposed cut this year which will have a direct effect on the services that we can provide and we will have to start cutting services. Q102 Mr Sanders: What is your view of the bureaucracy associated with the programme? Is there anything the Government could do or you could do at the local level to ease some of the complexities of monitoring and the bureaucracy associated with Supporting People? Mr Moore: I think there was a learning curve at the outset on Supporting People and I have to say I put my hand up because I still do not feel that I adequately know the full complexities of the Supporting People regime, and I am very fortunate to be in a team where we have people who understand it a lot better than I do, but it is complex. It is complex in the way it is put together, the way the bids were put together and the way it is applied across the board. Q103 Chairman: Could the Government simplify it? Mr Moore: We believe so, yes, that there are ways of simplifying the way forward. Q104 Chairman: So that would actually mean that the money got spent on people rather than government and local authority bureaucracy? Mr Moore: Well, we certainly have not got massive bureaucracy going into it, but certainly any regime where it ends up on the first day that you have got to carry out a major review of those contracts cannot be one that has been set up directly accountable. Q105 Mr Betts: Homeless people often have a variety of problems, apart from the fact that they have not got a home. It could be that those problems are created because they are homeless or it could be that they are homeless because of those problems, whether they are older people, people with mental health problems or people with alcohol or drug abuse problems. Have you got those problems sorted out so that you are actually dealing with the issues in a comprehensive way and other people providing services, other organisations, are actually linking into your homelessness strategy and is it actually working? Mr Moore: It does work, I would say, very much so. I think probably in terms of national averages we have double the amount of people presenting to us who are accepted as homeless who have, for example, mental health problems. About 20 per cent of our cases are mental health cases and about 20 per cent of our cases perhaps are physical disabilities and a further 10 per cent are elderly. Now, in all of those categories, they are about double the national average, so we have had to respond to those with direct links into floating support services and mental health professionals. We fund, along with the Wellcome Fund, and ODPM, I would hasten to add, various services around mental health assessments and ongoing support and these areas are vital in actually making sure that the homelessness issue is not just a matter of finding a home and putting somebody in there, but supporting the person as well and we are very clear that our services are holistic and they need to cover the range that we believe they do. Q106 Mr Betts: And is this an area where the Supporting People budget gets pushed down so that it creates further problems? Mr Moore: I think that the future on SP, as I have already intimated to a colleague of yours, is that the pressure which will happen from here on in will mean that services will have to be cut and some very hard and difficult decisions will have to be made and that could well be one of the areas. Q107 Mr Betts: In many cases homeless people, although they may be housed, are actually housed in temporary accommodation away from their normal area of residence and that then causes difficulties in terms of them accessing the support services for mental illness or drug and alcohol abuse, so is that a major problem area? Cllr Newman: I think that is a critical issue, and returning and linking that to something we said earlier around whether we should be investing in areas of London that are high cost, critically we should support services to temporary accommodation, the ability to have accessible and easy move-ons for somebody who has been homeless perhaps with other issues and challenges they are facing into temporary accommodation of one sort or another and the ability to be supported within what is their local community, and the ability perhaps for links in terms of family is critical here as well and the support structures there. So although there is an initial, if you like, extra cost and it is very easy to see housing in terms of saying it would just be cheaper to build everything in the Thames Gateway, clearly we need areas of growth as well and it is vital that the infrastructure is in place, but also investing across the capital is equally important, otherwise we are going to see whole areas of London where unless you are earning £200,000 a year, no one is going to be living there. I think a holistic approach is needed as to how the investment is looked at here because all the costs in terms of people with mental health problems or looking at the education costs of families moving around and the impact that has on education budgets, national health budgets and everything else, just seeing this in terms of housing and housing investment ultimately is not where we need to be. Q108 Christine Russell: The Government claims that the target for cutting the number of rough sleepers by two-thirds has been met. Has it in Westminster and across London? Mr Moore: Unfortunately not. We are experiencing extreme difficulty in dealing with the rough sleeping issue in Westminster. We are working very, very closely with the ODPM on our policies there, but we have not seen the reductions that we would have liked to have seen. We were targeting a reduction this year to below 100 by the end of the year and sadly I do not believe we will be achieving that. We have managed to reduce the numbers this year and our latest count brought the number down to 144 of rough sleepers, excluding the EU Accession States cases, of which there were a further 24 rough sleepers, but we are clearly struggling to get that number down. In order to try and move from our current system, in discussions with both the voluntary sector, with whom we work very closely, the police, who carry out enforcement services for us, and indeed the ODPM, who have sat down and worked out that we do need to move from where we are at the moment, which is a system where we are actually providing services on the street and to a certain extent that does, we acknowledge, sustain rough sleepers where they are, what we are moving to from next April is a building-based approach by which there will be a safety net on the streets to make sure that the most vulnerable do still receive services, but that all other people will be signposted to various hostels where those services and a more detailed and better assessment can be carried out indoors, and we want to make that break between services on the street and services inhouse. We hope and believe that that will be successful and we will start making strides towards reducing the numbers, which we are seeking. Q109 Christine Russell: What are you going to do if they refuse it, they just point blank refuse to go to any kind of support? Cllr Harvey: We will support them, we will continue to support those who are most vulnerable. Q110 Christine Russell: On the streets? Cllr Harvey: Certainly we will do that, but we hope that will be a very small number because those on the streets very clearly know that they are much more likely to be victims of crime, to get tuberculosis, that it is a rotten life, so if we can get people into the building base, on to education programmes and through the system and into a normal life, then that is obviously much better for them, but we will continue to support them. What I want to say very quickly though is of course that Westminster is the recipient of the rough sleeping problem of many other parts of the country where other councils do not have their own rough sleeping policy as clearly in place as ourselves, and, as I say, the mediation to get people to go back to where they have come from has been very successful, but for every 15 we get off the street, another 14 arrive. Q111 Christine Russell: That is the actual statistic? Cllr Harvey: Those are the statistics that we have been given and the numbers who arrive, new people, is 43 new people, never been seen rough sleeping before, so the churn is enormous. Q112 Mr Betts: Can I just raise the issue of hostel accommodation and, first of all, is there a pressure problem there where, like bed-blocking, people are staying in hostels far too long and, therefore, not making the spaces available when people want them sometimes on a temporary basis, and can anything be done about that immediately? Also, what about the quality of hostel accommodation and are steps being taken to improve it? Cllr Newman: It goes back to the need to have adequate move-on. There is pressure on hostel accommodation, but the way to address that is where people go from there and we are back into discussions about temporary accommodation, the adequate supply of temporary accommodation in terms of how we are funding that through housing benefit, often very high housing benefit rates, and whether that money could be invested elsewhere. Therefore, to keep the answer brief, Chairman, there are pressures and the long-term solution and answer that we need to continue to work on is the move-on accommodation from hostel accommodation. Mr Moore: We have a significant number of hostel beds in Westminster, around 1,100, and every night they are full. We have carried out a study of those and we believe there is a significant number of people who at one point may have needed that type of accommodation, but do not need it now, so part of our approach to this and move to the building base is to try to sift as many of the hostels as possible, and we are working very closely with the voluntary sector there to make sure that we get move-on in significant numbers to be able to move people off the streets because without the place to support them, the building-based approach will not work, so we are working very hard on that at the moment. Q113 Mr Clelland: Councillor Harvey was keen to talk about the local connections, so this is your opportunity. Are they appropriate to London and, if not, how will you change them? Cllr Harvey: The dysfunction is between the money which comes which is no longer local, but the requirement to house still is, and that is really the nub of it. We have had cut down to a fifth the amount of money that came into Westminster to build affordable housing and, as you can see, the number of people on our homeless register continues to rise. Q114 Mr Clelland: What changes do you want? Do you want more resources? Cllr Harvey: Yes, please! Also if there is a disconnection between supply and demand, we have got to do something about that, so what we would like is to see the local connection rule changed and perhaps instead of after six months or no local connection at all, we could move to some kind of compromise, a connection of two years in the last four, something like that, so that we still have a local connection rule so that we still regard communities and make them cohesive, but that we should not have to accept over half of our people at the moment that we have on the housing register with a connection of nothing at all or only six months in the last twelve. Q115 Mr Clelland: What about the arrangements by which local authorities refer homeless applicants to each other, the interconnection between local authorities? Do these work well? Mr Moore: That works well. Clearly everyone is suffering from supply difficulties, but clearly we do have instances where a particular case wants to be in a particular area, not necessarily within our sub-region, and we have these reciprocal arrangements. They have worked for many years and certainly I know with Tony's authority we have certainly accepted Croydon cases before and indeed they have taken some back in the other direction. Q116 Chairman: Do you think you have managed to refer enough on to the City of London? I will need a phrase from you rather than smiles to get it on the record! Mr Moore: They are reciprocal arrangements that we have got. Q117 Chairman: Would it not be better if the situation got worse in London because would that not convince a lot more people that it was worth moving back to the north of England, to places like Stoke or Burnley, places in the north-east where there are empty homes? Cllr Newman: Well, we have at the ALG got schemes which the ODPM has actually supported in terms of working with all those places and others that you have just named and some people have taken the opportunity to move, but clearly there is a link here, perhaps speaking with a Local Government Association hat on briefly, in terms of where we are going with employment opportunities and training opportunities because the pressures that we get in London which feed back from those authorities and others that you named are that they can see some of these people as a burden on them and it is very much encouraging families to move on if there are employment and education opportunities in other parts of the country and I think that is where we need to get to. I do think that we need to wonder really in terms of what are still some of the projected large-scale demolitions in parts of the country. I know a place in Hull very well and plans to knock down large swathes of that are still in place and there has been a mini housing boom in Hull, so it has gone from £5,000 a property to £30,000 a property. People do want to move into some of these areas, but whether anyone from London would go there, I do not know. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for your evidence. Witnesses: Ms Janice Samuels, Homelessness Services Manager, Salford City Council; Ms Janice Bennett, Housing Services Manager, South Ribble Borough Council; and Ms Julie Watson, Service Manager, and Ms Fiona Goodfellow, Trustee, (formerly Needs Manager, South Ribble Borough Council), South Ribble Key, examined. Q118 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the second session this morning of our evidence session on homelessness and can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record. Ms Watson: I am Julie Watson, Service Manager for South Ribble Key, a charity working with young people on homelessness and housing issues. Ms Goodfellow: I am Fiona Goodfellow. I am a trustee of South Ribble Key. I was formerly working for the housing services at South Ribble Council until a year ago. Ms Bennett: I am Janice Bennett and I am the Housing Services Manager at South Ribble Borough Council. Ms Samuels: I am Janice Samuels and I am the Homelessness Services Manager of Salford City Council. Q119 Chairman: Do any of you want to make an opening statement or are you happy for us to go straight into questions? Ms Bennett: Just one thing, in the interests of partnership, to say that South Ribble Key with the Borough Council celebrated ten years of working together this year and we have a calendar which shows places where you can sleep rough in the borough. (Same handed) Chairman: Thank you. Q120 Mr Betts: Local authorities generally, but yours in particular, are seeing quite significant rises in the number of homeless applications since the 2002 Act. Is that due to the change in the priority needs categories or are there other factors? Certainly in my own constituency of Sheffield and when we talked to Birmingham the other week, there is some evidence that with the rising house prices more people cannot actually afford to buy a home and they are either remaining tenants of social landlords or they may be exercising their right to buy their own property and as fewer people are rehoused off the housing list, maybe some are choosing the homeless route as a way of trying to find a quicker route into housing. Ms Bennett: I would totally agree with you. Certainly in the last five years house prices in the area have doubled and they were never particularly on the cheap side for central Lancashire anyway, so I think it is between the two. I think it is obviously very high house prices, and wages and salaries have not gone up to match them, and demand where a very, very low percentage are social rented housing, less than 10 per cent for the borough and nearly 90 per cent are owner/occupation and that is a traditional thing both in Lancashire and in the local area, so I think that things have contributed to rising homelessness. Ms Goodfellow: I think in respect of the first part of your question, changes in the Homelessness Act, with the presentations from 16- to 17-year-olds there has been a really sharp increase. Ms Samuels: In Salford with the extensions to the Priority Needs Order, the 16- and 17-year-olds have been the ones which have significantly increased. There are a number of issues around that. We have certainly found that the younger end of the 16- to 17-year-old age bracket have been the ones that have been presenting to us and they often come with very complex needs which are not solved, if you like, by providing them with accommodation even with support for those very young 16-year-olds, who are often just out of school and taking quite a long time getting an independent tenancy and being able to sustain it, and that does cause us some concern in the city. We are slightly different in terms of housing demand and house prices. Salford has always traditionally been an authority that has had quite low demand for its housing stock and it has often been the wrong supply, it has not been the right type of accommodation that people have wanted and, therefore, before the Homelessness Act, we actually did not really have that much of an accommodation problem. It might not have been the right type, but we certainly had enough to be able to meet people's needs. We were hit by a number of factors along with the Homelessness Act around our housing market new pathfinder and house prices are starting to rise, they are beginning to rise and that has had some effect. We are also finding that people are thinking that the route into certainly the public sector stock is by the homelessness route and not by the housing register because the choice is not there at the moment and that is to come with the housing market new pathfinder, so that is similar, yes. Q121 Mr Clelland: What is preventing the expansion of the provision for 16- to 17-year-olds? If demand exceeds supply, how do you cope? Ms Samuels: We do have very, very strong links with social services and with the connections that we have in Salford and we work in partnership with them. What we have found is that even despite that and having a cross-service group that meets around 16- to 17-year-olds' issues, we are dealing with people's lives which are very, very complex and it is often how we manage the services to come into that and certainly funding will come into it in the next few years because, going back to the last speakers, we are very conscious that any cuts to the Supporting People budget will actually have an effect on those services to the less popular client groups in the city and because it will be reducing possibly on the client groups that need those services. Q122 Mr Clelland: Why are more 16- and 17-year olds presenting themselves these days? Ms Samuels: We find there are a number of different reasons why they come to us. Often they come to us because there are issues around domestic violence in the property. That could be that they themselves are the victims of violence or it could be that they are witnessing violence within the home. There will be other young people who just have a row with their parents and do not want to stay there. Q123 Mr Clelland: There is not a greater incidence of that now than there was previously but yet we are getting more presenting themselves, so why is that? Ms Samuels: I think there is an awareness of where you can go to get housing services and the services that you need. A big thing for us and something that has started to make a difference is that we have a youth mediator who works in Connexions and when young people come to us he does some work with the family and the young people to try and negotiate them back home in the short term and just give them a bit of a reality check about living in temporary accommodation services and what living independently means. Q124 Mr Clelland: Are all those who present themselves entirely honest in their reasons for being homeless or do you think that often there is collusion between young people and their parents even and their friends to engineer themselves to jump the queue? Ms Samuels: What we find is, because we are dealing with teenagers in particular, if they have a row with mum, or mum has said something that they do not particularly like, their immediate reaction will be to come to Housing Services and say, "I cannot live at home any more. My mum has told me I have to leave". It is about putting some checks around that information, so we have our youth mediator who will talk to the family and often you will get behind the fact that they have just had a row that day. What it does is offer some check about the ones who are coming through to us who have got genuine homelessness issues or where it has just been the fact that they are perhaps not wanting to be at home because they have had a row. Ms Watson: In terms of collusion, I do not think that happens very often. The young people that come to us are usually in a fairly serious state of crisis. Even if it is the fact that they have just had a row, it is not usually the first row; it is usually a long way down the track and when we do try and get them to build bridges and be able to go back home it is often the parents that will not do that, not the young people. Mr Clelland: But these social and domestic strains have always been there, and yet we have more 16-year olds and 17-year olds now presenting themselves as homeless. It is not because this has just happened. Presumably there are other reasons behind why they now think they want to leave home and live on their own. Q125 Chairman: It should be improving, should it not, because the percentage of young people in the population is steadily going down, so the number of 16-year olds and 17-year olds is fewer now than it was a few years ago? Ms Watson: I think there is a vast difference in expectation both of the young people and also of their parents. I do not think that leads into collusion issues but I think there is a vast difference in what people expect to be able to do. Their parents expect that when a young person gets to 16 they can say, "Right; fine. We have gone through this for a number of years. We have actually had enough now. If you think you can stand on your own feet you go and do it", and they cut off the support. That is a change. Ms Bennett: It is society generally. Ms Goodfellow: There is a change also in family breakdowns. There are a lot of issues with step-parents now and that is due to the change in society. Q126 Mr Sanders: South Ribble has told us of its initiatives dedicated to preventing homelessness and meeting the needs of homeless people outside the social housing sector. Do Salford have similar strategies? Are there constraints that prevent further development of these initiatives and, if so, what can be done to remove them? Ms Samuels: We are just beginning to get to grips with a prevention agenda in the city. We experienced a doubling of homelessness presentation over a two-year period in the city. We are working towards a prevention agenda and we are funding it by the reductions that we are making in our bed and breakfast spend. The areas that we are looking at in particular are doing home visits to cases, using our floating support services. We have quite a large floating support service in Salford which is funded by Supporting People, so we are targeting those services to where tenancies are breaking down. We have developed a prevention template so that when people come to us with a housing problem we look at what that problem is and what services we can put in place to try and prevent that tenancy failing. We are working towards - and it will cost money - looking at a range of private sector incentives because we feel that one of the solutions in the city is within the private rented sector and we want to look at how we can encourage private sector landlords to play a part in the retention of housing for homeless people, but there will be a gap in that everybody always wants more money but we feel in terms of priorities for local authorities that is quite a big one for us. We cannot just keep on this treadmill of constantly having lots of homeless people presentations and moving people on into accommodation without trying to put in support services to keep them there, so we are now moving towards quite a strong prevention agenda. Q127 Mr Sanders: Is the use of the private sector in those circumstances not more expensive? Ms Samuels: Yes. The private rented sector in Salford is probably nowhere near the prices that people would experience in London but in terms of where assured shorthold tenancies are failing, and that is certainly one of our main preventing factors in the last couple of years in the city, that can often be for quite a small amount of money when you get behind the reasons why those tenancies are ending. It could be that people have had a benefit shortfall and they have got a small amount of rent arrears which is making a private sector landlord not want to keep that tenancy on, so for a relatively small amount of money, if we invested in that to keep the assured shorthold tenancy going that would mean significant savings in terms of us not having to place them in temporary accommodation. Q128 Chairman: Are you doing that or just hoping to do that? Ms Samuels: That is our financial plan for the next year. We have just put in our budget bid for the next year and we are putting some monies forward to use around that agenda as opposed to having a significant temporary accommodation budget. Q129 Mr Sanders: How are you trying to prevent homelessness amongst young people? Ms Samuels: We have a number of different things we are trying. As I said, we work very closely with Connexions and we have a youth mediator whose background is working in social services with those young people and going into schools and spreading the prevention agenda amongst young people. He plays a significant role in talking to the families and to the young person and trying to find some middle ground, even if it is only negotiating that young person back for a few months so that we can plan better what to do. We also now do home visits so our officers will go out and talk to parents and children in the home and see if there is a new arrangement we can come to in order to keep them there. The only thing we make sure of is that there are no issues of domestic violence because we obviously do not want to put young people back into a difficult situation. We also are doing a piece of work at the moment with young people we have got in our 16-year olds and 17-year olds temporary accommodation provision. Those young people are doing a piece of work around their experiences of homelessness and temporary accommodation. What we are hoping to do is take that back into the schools, but that is something that we have got in development. With the young people that we are seeing, and I do not know whether you find this in South Ribble, it is often too late to do that preventative work. By the time we know about it it is almost too late to build bridges. Mr Sanders: What about children leaving care? In South Ribble's evidence they talk about a joint protocol for those leaving local authority care. Q130 Chairman: Come on. You can have a protocol but does it work? Ms Bennett: Yes, it does work. It works very well. We piloted it for Lancashire. It is being renegotiated at the moment to tweak it to see if we can make it work a bit better with the county council. Q131 Chairman: So what does it mean? Ms Bennett: Both ourselves and South Ribble Key can have social services for a joint meeting about that young person and call a joint panel; the young person is there and it is discussed about what services that young person will need. Q132 Chairman: Come on, bluntly: does the young person get a house or a flat or something? Ms Bennett: Yes, that is what the outcome of it is. Going back to what you said earlier on, obviously our problem is that we have not got the right sort of stock. South Ribble is traditionally family housing stock or sheltered housing for the elderly, whereas our homeless people that go into temporary accommodation wait an average of nine weeks for an offer of permanent accommodation, for a young person it is obviously much longer because there are very few flats that people can go into. They are very reluctant to share, which is another issue amongst young people. Obviously, a really good answer would be for three of them to get together and share a three-bedroom house and everybody would be happy sharing bills but they just will not do it. Their aspirations are totally different. You tend to find that university or college students will share but the sort of young people we get coming through really do insist that they want somewhere of their own which comes with bills and furnishing and everything else. Ms Goodfellow: Added to that you have got to put in the support necessary to help the young person sustain the tenancy. It has also got to be in an area where there is a support network close to friends and relatives. It is no good putting them in an area where they are going to fail because then it is back to square one again. Q133 Mr Sanders: We have received quite a lot of evidence that says that local authorities vary considerably in how they interpret the homeless legislation and guidance. What can be done to bring about a more consistent approach? Ms Goodfellow: In South Lancashire and other parts of Lancashire we have got sub-regional groups of our homelessness officers meeting where they discuss operational issues and part of that is how you interpret intentionality, who you might consider in priority need, that sort of thing. Q134 Chairman: What sort of percentage of the people who present are you accepting? Ms Bennett: About 53 or 54 per cent. Q135 Chairman: And Salford? Ms Samuels: Salford's is 50 or 55 per cent. Ms Bennett: It has not changed over the years. Q136 Chairman: It is more than double what Westminster are accepting. Ms Bennett: Yes. Q137 Mr Clelland: According to South Ribble you have almost a quarter of applicants coming from outside the district, not all families with legitimate reasons for doing so. Is that also the case in Salford? Ms Samuels: No. Q138 Mr Clelland: It is not the case in Salford? Ms Samuels: No. We do not have lots of presentations from outside the area. Ms Bennett: It is because we are central Lancashire and there are three local authorities whose boundaries wrap around each other. From the centre of Preston to the centre of Leyland to the centre of Chorley is five miles in any direction. They are very close and if you look on a map it looks like one area. People do not see local authority boundaries. They are just administrative boundaries, so people move between them quite freely. If you have a local connection, the local connection can be that you live in Preston but your mum and dad live in Leyland, and if you are homeless under the legislation you have equal access to any of those local authorities because of those local connections. It is very close as a county, particularly in central Lancashire. Q139 Mr Clelland: Do you think anything can be done to reduce that problem? Ms Bennett: I think we cope with it very well. Q140 Mr Clelland: Yes, but do you think anything could be done in terms of legislation, in terms of the rules, to reduce the problem for South Ribble? Ms Bennett: I do not think we see it at all as a big problem. Q141 Mr Clelland: What about the arrangements by which local authorities refer homeless applicants to each other? Do they work well? Ms Goodfellow: We have reciprocal arrangements. South Ribble works particularly with Chorley and Preston quite well. We refer one to them and they refer one back. It works well. Ms Bennett: Ten years ago Chorley and South Ribble did a homeless hostel together and we are looking at other schemes we can do jointly in order to share limited resources between three small district councils. Q142 Chairman: Manchester has been getting tough with people on the streets. Has that meant they come across to Salford? Ms Samuels: We have not noticed a significant rise in rough sleepers. We have always had in Salford a very low count in terms of rough sleepers. The view within the authority is that that is probably because Salford does not have a centre, which Manchester very clearly does. We do know that Manchester have tightened up, if you like, in terms of visible rough sleeping. We have not noticed that there has been a significant impact on rough sleeping in Salford. When we do our next rough sleepers' count we may find that there has been a significant change. Q143 Chairman: When is the next one due? Ms Samuels: We are going to do one in the spring/summer of next year, 2005. Q144 Chairman: Would it not be logical to do one in the winter? Ms Samuels: The only thing that we find in Salford when we do rough sleeper counts is that there is not this highly visible presence, so we feel that if we did it in the winter months we would not be able to find anybody. Q145 Chairman: What you mean is that they find somewhere warm to hide away? They still exist? Ms Samuels: Yes. Q146 Chairman: So your count is not very good? Ms Samuels: At this moment we cannot find ways of finding out where those rough sleepers are going in the winter months. Q147 Christine Russell: Can I ask you about co-operation between agencies? The North West Housing Forum says it is not very good in the North West and you indicated earlier that you thought it was pretty good in Salford between housing and social services. How is it in South Ribble? Ms Watson: You actually get good relationships between individuals. Q148 Christine Russell: At officer level? Ms Watson: Yes, and that is the thing that makes the difference. You mentioned earlier that protocols do not always work and I agree with that totally, but if you have got co-operation between individuals you can go and contact about it if you have got some money, that is going to work. That is down to the individual relationships. There are issues around some of the wider things and Lancashire is a very big county. There are 12 funding districts. Q149 Christine Russell: Is that a problem, where you have two-tier authorities? Ms Bennett: Yes. Q150 Christine Russell: Where you have districts looking after housing issues and the county looking after social services? Ms Bennett: Yes. Ms Goodfellow: There has always been a strong partnership between the county and the voluntary sector in South Ribble and a lot of the initiatives ----- Q151 Christine Russell: At district level? Ms Goodfellow: Yes, at district level. A lot of the initiatives we have got together for young people involve liaison with the voluntary sector. Q152 Christine Russell: What about PCTs and health? Ms Bennett: PCTs formerly were local area health authorities. South Ribble Key were one of the founders of it. It was set up to give young people a focus rather than have, as they term it, men in grey suits which they did not think they could go to. That was one of the reasons that we founded the Key. The health authority and the PCT are very much on board with funding it and they see the benefits of it. Q153 Christine Russell: Do you feel in your area the health authorities are being quite responsive to homeless people? Ms Bennett: Yes. Homelessness is one of their priorities and has been for at least the last ten years. Homelessness is very firmly on their agenda as well as hospitals and everything else. Q154 Christine Russell: It is on their agenda but what practical things are they doing about it? Ms Bennett: We have a lot of work with home visitors and we do a lot of training of home visitors around domestic violence and young people. We work on a lot of different schemes and there are various groups that we work with at operational level. Q155 Christine Russell: What about alcohol and drug using? Ms Watson: We work very closely with the PCT team as part of the Drug and Alcohol Action Group locally, so all the agencies do come together and work in partnership. It is very nice to work in a district where it is not just a talking shop. It is very easy to go on into that but we get lots of results out which make a difference to people. Ms Bennett: Under Supporting People we know that we have not got good enough local drug and alcohol services. That has come from the needs assessment for Lancashire and that is going to be one of Supporting People's priorities if it has enough money to commission new services. Q156 Chairman: Are you expecting to have enough money? Ms Bennett: No. Ms Goodfellow: That is a big frustration because you are assessing all the needs, and there is clearly a need specifically for ----- Q157 Chairman: So you are spending your money assessing the needs rather than actually giving a service? Ms Bennett: No. It is such a big county. The partnership Supporting People has 12 local authorities, eight primary care trusts and the county council and probation. They believe that is the biggest partnership in England for Supporting People. The admin team itself in Supporting People consists of seven people. Social services have had to put additional resources in to get it up to that number, because the admin grant is quite small, in order to be able to deliver something like 300 or 400 contracts across Lancashire. They are very diverse contracts too. Q158 Christine Russell: But is that partly because the politicians just have not made it a high enough priority in Lancashire? Ms Bennett: It could be. Q159 Christine Russell: Can I ask you finally about the response that you tend to get in your two areas from social services, where you have the case of a family who have obviously made themselves intentionally homeless and perhaps there is a vulnerable member or child in that family? Ms Bennett: It is usually quite good. Again, it is local officers working who contact them and they will work with you on the case. They have taken people, they have paid off debts in the past, social services, in order to ensure that that family gets rehoused. 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. 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 ten 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. 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. Memoranda submitted by National Housing Federation and Yorkshire and Humberside Housing Forum Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Diane Henderson, Head of Care Support and Diversity, Ms Helen Williams, Head of Neighbourhoods and Sustainability, and Mr John Rosser, Operations Director, Southern Housing Group Ltd, National Housing Federation, and Mr Josh Sutton, Housing and Advice Manager, Craven Housing, Mr Les Williamson, Head of Housing, Harrogate Borough Council, and Mr Richard Williamson, Yorkshire Coast Homes, Yorkshire and Humberside Forum, examined. Q172 Chairman: Can I welcome our witnesses to the final session of our evidence this afternoon? Can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record? If you agree with each other, please keep quiet. If you disagree, please come in. Ms Henderson: I am Diane Henderson, National Housing Federation. I am Head of Care Support and Diversity. Ms Williams: I am Helen Williams from the National Housing Federation, Head of Neighbourhoods and Sustainability. Mr Rosser: I am Jon Rosser from Southern Housing Group, and I am on the Housing Management Committee at the National Housing Federation. Mr Sutton: I am Josh Sutton. I am the Housing and Advice Manager at Craven Housing. Craven Housing deliver the homes service on behalf of Craven District Council. Mr Williamson: I am Les Williamson, Director of Health and Housing, Harrogate Borough Council. Mr Adamson: I am Richard Adamson, Director of Housing, Yorkshire Coast Homes. We manage the homes and services for Scarborough Borough Council. Q173 Chairman: Does anyone want to say anything introductory or shall we go straight to questions? Ms Williams: We would like to make a brief opening statement. At the National Housing Federation we believe that long term solutions to homelessness require planning policies, lettings policies and investment strategies to deliver mixed communities and mixed communities are therefore the best places for individuals to thrive and for communities to have the best chance of success, and that we need to avoid the past mistakes of ghettoising vulnerable people in disadvantaged areas. We think a key to long term housing solutions for homeless people is tenancy sustainment and that Supporting People funding is essential to that. Questions are raised by the issues around the continuity of Supporting People funding. What we want to stress is the importance of long term solutions allowing homeless people to be resettled in mixed neighbourhoods. Q174 Mr Betts: Supporting People you have just mentioned, so let us begin there. How can it be made more effective and have you got any criticisms of how it has been operating up to the present? Ms Henderson: We also need to say that it is a successful programme at one level because there is a great deal more money around to identify vulnerable people than there was before it. A lot of the causes of homelessness are around drug and alcohol misuse and domestic violence and there are obviously key people that Supporting People's funding has been directed at. There are some very positive measures, and you heard some of them in the last presentation, in the tenancy sustainment programme where, if Supporting People money can be used to support people, then not only does it help them get into the most appropriate housing but it also stops the revolving door of people falling out of housing and re-presenting, but there are problems. The whole general stability of the programme is a concern. We are still waiting for this year's allocation. We know there is going to be at least a two and a half per cent cut and for some people it is as high as seven and a half per cent, so people are very reluctant to plan long term. We know roughly what the total figures are for years 2 and 3 from now and some of the most forward-thinking local authorities are beginning to plan, but you can understand the nervousness of people planning and everyone is being very cautious. To get new money into the system for additional schemes the only real mechanism is to take money away from something else and that is obviously very difficult when you are working with one group of clients and people are very nervous about that. Again, Supporting People allows for cross-authority mechanisms, which is particularly an issue for quite mobile single homeless people but there does seem to be some evidence that because of the way the money is paid to an administering authority there is some reluctance to be providing a service to someone who technically is with the authority next door. I think that is particularly true of some of the urban unitary authorities whereas in a two-tier system, because the money sits at county level, it can be less of an issue. One of the other things that we have not done in Supporting People is recognise the savings from other departments. If someone has a mental health problem and is appropriately housed with that low level quite cheap support, that would probably be enough to prevent crisis admission into a psychiatric unit. That crisis admission can cost something like £24,000 a week, whereas Supporting People support might be five or six hours at £15 or £20 a week. I do not think we have a mechanism for other departments to measure the savings of Supporting People which might raise its profile and increase its funds. Finally, we do not have a mechanism at the moment for how we put additional supported housing money into the growth areas that the community planners are looking at opening. They are looking at massive development, not particularly down the Thames Gateway expensive houses route, and for those local authorities there is no mechanism for them to receive additional funds so that when those communities start we want to sustain them with less anti-social behaviour, hooking into crime safety policies, which is where Supporting People money would be really helpful, but there is not a mechanism to do it. Mr Williamson: Could I give a slightly different perspective from North Yorkshire? In terms of Supporting People, we face rather starker difficulties. As you heard from your earlier witnesses, a lot of the additional homelessness presentations since the extension of the 2002 programme are for young people with care and support needs. In North Yorkshire the size of the project is inadequate to meet existing support needs, let alone the additional demands that are coming through as homeless presentations week in, week out, and indeed next year we face the ten per cent cut from Supporting People, so there are real concerns about our ability not just to provide accommodation for young single people but also to support the needs that they have. Q175 Mr Clelland: In their evidence the National Housing Federation expressed some concern about the ODPM targets for reducing rough sleeping and ending bed and breakfast for families and children. Is that a concern which is shared by Yorkshire and Humberside Housing Forum? Could we hear a bit more about what the specific concerns are? Mr Williamson: If I could deal with the bed and breakfast issue, in Harrogate we were congratulated at our success in meeting the government's target of not keeping in bed and breakfast for longer than six weeks families with dependent children, but we responded by saying that that masks a real difficulty because in actual fact our bed and breakfast costs have gone up by 300 per cent for other categories of homeless presentations, particularly young single people with support needs. Someone mentioned earlier the size of the bed and breakfast expenditure. Two or three years ago we were spending £1,000 per year on bed and breakfast in Harrogate. Last year we spent £102,000 and that figure is likely to be breached again this year, so there are real concerns. An additional concern we have is that more recently we have had to accommodate people in bed and breakfast outside the district. We have always tried to provide temporary accommodation within the district but as of today we have got something like 19 or 20 households in temporary accommodation, bed and breakfast, in Leeds. Mr Adamson: Speaking as someone who works at a seaside resort, one of the issues at Scarborough is that it is going to be extremely difficult long term to meet the government's target of six weeks for families and pregnant women simply because of the small amount of affordable housing that is available in the programme. For the first time since the late eighties/early nineties every single letting in Scarborough borough in the last year has been to somebody who is statutorily homeless with a family. Whether it is a house or a flat it has 100 per cent gone to homeless families. That is likely to continue to be the case even with the prevention strategies we have got in place which are having some effect. We have still got as many homeless acceptances as there are vacancies occurring per week. Q176 Chairman: Is that encouraging people to think that if they are on your housing list they have no chance, so they become homeless? Mr Adamson: Realistically the only chance anybody has got of getting a tenancy is to be statutorily homeless, so I have no doubt there are some who decide that they perhaps might not try as hard as they might otherwise do to avoid being homeless. The trick is to try and create some headroom whereby we get back to the position where some people are being rehoused straight off the housing register simply because of their housing needs and not simply because they are homeless, and if we work that trick again, which we managed to do in the early nineties, hopefully it will tilt the balance and the presentations will start to go down. At the moment, if you want affordable housing the only way you can get it is to apply and be accepted as statutorily homeless. Q177 Christine Russell: So what are your local planning authorities doing about increasing the provision of affordable housing through the planning system? Ms Williams: We have a difficulty in North Yorkshire in the sense that the regional planning policy for North Yorkshire emphasises restraint in development as part of a regional policy of encouraging regeneration of former industrial areas in West and South Yorkshire. Q178 Christine Russell: Even for affordable homes? Ms Williams: I will come back to that in a second. Within the overall availability of sites for affordable housing there is an emphasis on restraint in development with that regeneration objective. Also, the North Yorkshire authorities, in fact all of them, have affordable housing planning policies which require developers of what would otherwise be market housing to provide a percentage of affordable housing. Q179 Christine Russell: What is it in Harrogate? Ms Williams: Fifty per cent in Harrogate is the target. Q180 Christine Russell: So how many units has that delivered in the last year or two? Ms Williams: We have had in the last year or two a couple of large sites, which is exceptional: a hospital site and a Ministry of Defence site, so it is probably in excess of 100 units. That is an exceptional return. We do not have sites of that size on a regular basis. Q181 Christine Russell: So you have only had 200 homes built in Harrogate in the last year or two, of which 100 have been affordable? Ms Williams: We do not always achieve 50 per cent. It is a negotiating target. There are some community benefits other than housing which are sometimes thrown into the equation by developers to reduce the ----- Q182 Christine Russell: So it is not a high priority in itself to say that the priority should be affordable housing and not swimming pools or parks or whatever? Ms Williams: It is a priority for the council, affordable housing. Q183 Mr Clelland: The National Housing Federation said in evidence to us that the success of the rough sleepers' programme is in danger of becoming the next problem. Ms Henderson: I think what has happened is that the number of people actually sleeping on the street did decrease but, rather than people moving into hostel and other temporary accommodation, and well done to Yorkshire and Humberside for following that up with the hostel redevelopment programme to improve that, what is happening is that people are in those hostels and losing the next bit. Again, a hostel manager is not housing them, although itt may be simplistic to say that. As people move into hostels there is not then the next move which is permanent housing. We tend in the jargon to say that they have moved on but actually what we mean is that there is not enough permanent housing to serve people. Therefore, people stay in hostels. They are not moving on and they are not allowed the next intake, if you like, until people have that support into the environment and not in a hostel. Q184 Mr Clelland: Is it purely the shortage of housing that is the problem? Ms Williams: It is houses in the right place of the right size where people want to live. It is not just housing. Obviously, that is more acute in London and the south east than it is in some areas, but, just from evidence walking around, people are moving back to the streets slowly. That is anecdotal; I have no way to prove that, but my feeling is that it is backing down to the streets. We need to look at whether there are more imaginative ways of people moving from those hostels to permanent housing. Q185 Mr Betts: Have you given some consideration to the problems arising from the rehousing of homeless people? The National Housing Federation stresses the danger of having too many homeless people in the same area. On the other hand there may be some local authorities and housing associations whose policies effectively prevent homeless families from being taken on, or certain homeless families. Have you got concerns in those areas? Mr Rosser: Perhaps I could come in as my association works in London and the south east, so we deal a lot with housing homeless as they come out of temporary accommodation. We, like most associations, give a very high percentage of our re-lets and new units to the local authorities to nominate to and most of those tend to go to the homeless. There are concerns, particularly with some of the very big sites that we are now moving to in London and Thames Gateway, that you could get quite divided communities with half of it or thereabouts being solely for owner occupation and very low numbers of children, it tending to be couples without children who buy those properties. Then at the back of the site you can have very high levels of density as we house homeless families. I have got one scheme which we are letting at the moment in the Gateway. In the first 74 units we have got 220 children, which is the size of a small primary school. We have been talking to the council about this and have actually agreed a lettings plan for subsequent phases so that we can try and ameliorate it a bit, but the pressures on them to house their homeless are such that we cannot let it in quite the way we would like to, and so we do get what on the surface look like balanced communities with a mix of housing for sale and affordable housing, but in reality the two are quite polarised communities living adjacent to each other. Q186 Mr Clelland: You have got agreement there. If the authorities were not willing to reach some agreement should the housing association have the right to say, "We are going to refuse to accept that number of people with children who are effectively homeless people"? Mr Rosser: Accepting nominations is a condition of us accepting the grant, so we cannot simply say we will not. There is a debate going on in some authorities who are more flexible than others in this. At a strategic level most of them recognise the issue: these communities are in their areas and their councillors have to represent them, so they have an interest too in them working. Nevertheless, the pressures are there. I think those pressures grow as we get these larger schemes where the boroughs nominating to them are not necessarily the borough that they are in so that you get people from elsewhere nominated. They have a bit less interest in how they run subsequently and that is a concern. Ms Williams: Can I pick up a little bit on planning policy on that? It is also about the use of planning policy not only to deliver affordable housing units but also to ensure that developments are mixed so that we do not see polarised developments for owner occupied housing here and social rented accommodation there but that there is a true mix. Q187 Mr Clelland: In terms of exclusions of certain people from the homeless provision have local authorities got the right to say to people, "You have been engaged in anti-social behaviour in the past. We have got this on your record. You may have come here homeless but we are going to take that into account and have decided that you are intentionally homeless"? Mr Williamson: There is a difficulty there because we perceive that as an inconsistency between the way in which homelessness legislation is drafted, which focuses around the loss of the last settled accommodation, and the way in which exclusions policies are applied, where you can look further back into a person's housing history and exclude them from permanent housing on previous tenancy misconduct, for being in rent arrears or for anti-social behaviour or whatever. Indeed, we have six cases in Harrogate at the present time of statutorily having to accept someone who is homeless who you then exclude from permanent rehousing because of previous tenancy misconduct, either by the council or through nomination for housing association. Q188 Mr Clelland: So why do they accept them as homeless if they lost their last tenancy, say, because they were a thorough nuisance to their neighbours? Mr Williamson: That would not be a problem if they lost the last tenancy through that, but they may have lost their last tenancy, which may have been an assured shorthold tenancy, with no blemish on their record, but if you look further back into their tenancy history there is tenancy misconduct. Q189 Chairman: Can you not come up with a scheme by which you manage the new tenancy so that they are probation tenants and pressure is put on them to conform this time? Mr Williamson: You can use probationary tenancies. One of the difficulties that we face is that in trying to nominate these applicants on to the housing associations, the housing associations are looking for evidence of a credible support package and then we run up against the difficulties of Supporting People funding in providing that. Q190 Chairman: What sort of proportion of the credible support case has actually failed? It only costs money if they fail, does it not? Mr Williamson: It will because it will result in what is called the revolving homelessness syndrome. I have not got the information with me unfortunately. Ms Williams: The Housing Corporation published research in 2003 about housing associations' practices in this area. They found that active rejection of nominations by housing associations was fairly rare. When it looked at the main causes of nominations being made to housing associations by local authorities and then not being taken on, it was around issues of outdated information, which was one of the main reasons, so they might nominate someone but subsequently they would have had more children so the property they had been nominated to was not suitable. Where there was an issue of contested nominations one of the most common reasons was around care and support availability to enable that person to retain the tenancy they were nominated to. Mr Sutton: Can I add to that? In Craven, which is a large rural area, we have found that we have not had much of an issue with nominations and blanket exclusions. We have gone some way to try and strengthen that by making sure that we form a nominations group whereby all the housing associations who accept nominations from the local authority get together on a quarterly basis and the idea is to exchange information, perhaps get to know each other and give reassurances about the information that we can pass on about people we have nominated to other associations. Q191 Christine Russell: Following on from what Mr Sutton has just said, at the National Federation you obviously have an overview of the situation. How well in general do you think local authorities and social registered landlords do co-operate on homeless strategies? Ms Henderson: On the actual strategies? The ODPM has just done some research itself with the Housing Quality Network which has been published in the last month. What is quite interesting is that they say 50 per cent of local authorities' homeless strategies have been worked on in partnership. I was surprised it was only 50 per cent. Talking to our members, I would say that I suspect one or two major associations in an area may have been involved which might actually up that percentage a bit. I do think there is an issue, generally, with strategies in how they do involve their stakeholders but support other housing providers in association and how they talk to other parts of the housing system. We had good examples from Salford of their homelessness and supporting people strategies' meetings but that is not the norm. Q192 Christine Russell: Is it usually the case that the big powerful local authority does not involve and engage with perhaps the smaller housing providers, many of whom are not supported? Ms Henderson: I think in some places the strategy is written as a sort of strategic exercise as opposed to a partnership working. As someone said earlier, I think when you have got individual relationships that work, you have got a much better partnership working in reality than probably there is in some of those strategies. There is always that danger that the local authority has a statutory duty and a power in that sense. The other thing that the report said was that a similar response, even where it has been delegated to a LSVT, a transferred association has taken that role, the percentage that has been involved is about the same. Q193 Christine Russell: Can I ask in Yorkshire and Humberside, how well do you think local homeless strategies are tied in with the regional housing board strategies? Mr Sutton: From a district perspective we found in developing the homelessness strategy we had a very strong partnership and networking ethic in the district. A number of housing associations - probably about 50 per cent of the housing associations - with stock in the area were involved directly with the homelessness strategy and, more importantly, supporting housing agencies under the support agencies were equally involved. We feel that we have a well constructed strategy, certainly from a partnership ethic and a partnership input point of view. That is also fed up, broadly now, from the district into the county in terms of North Yorkshire County Homeless Group meeting on a regular basis where each of the seven authorities in that group will bring up issues and continue to revisit, if you like, the homelessness strategies brought forward. Q194 Christine Russell: What about at regional level, within the wider area? Mr Adamson: It is not as explicitly prominent as it could be. Currently we are consulting through the sub-regions within Yorkshire and Humberside on the current role of the region strategy. Certainly in North Yorkshire, from the regional consultation events, homelessness has been flagged up much more prominently as an issue which needs to feature and roll forward in the regional housing strategy. The emphasis of the existing 2003-05 strategy is, as I said earlier, regeneration of the former industrial areas whilst it recognises, also, the needs of high demand areas and affordability issues in areas like North Yorkshire. The reference to homelessness is much more limited than I would expect to see in the future. Mr Sutton: If I can just add on to that. The relatively recent convening of the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Homelessness Group, which was convened by Government Office, is beginning to be a useful forum in which we can get together across the region and again look at issues. An example of its work is across the region the group has been looking at the blanket exclusions policies and the problems encountered with some nomination arrangements. The homelessness from a regional perspective is beginning to develop quite strongly. Q195 Christine Russell: I think it has developed more strongly in the West Midlands, is that what you are telling us? Ms Henderson: Partly yes, from the evidence we gave that example. I think the key thing to say is that it is the regional housing strategy which has resources behind it. It is that strategy that will determine where new houses are going to be built so the importance of linking up where homelessness is with where new houses are going to be built, and hopefully where new towns and people resources will go - those strategies are also linking in - is just absolutely crucial. Also, the regional level is potentially where the idea of more complex letting plans can link together in terms of not rehousing all homeless people in one area, you can have mixed lettings on a new site. Regional housing strategies I think are crucial and they are not mentioned in the ODPM's strategy. Q196 Christine Russell: Can I ask you, gentlemen, the same question I posed to the ladies of South Ribble and Salford which is how well is the partnership working in your patches with social services and health, particularly with those homeless people who have got acute problems? Mr Williamson: Speaking from the Scarborough perspective, one of the problems in North Yorkshire is all the local authorities have traditionally catered for families and the elderly in terms of housing they have provided. In Scarborough borough only three per cent of the stock was dedicated to being accommodation for single people to work, and the disabled. There is a real issue not only about support but getting a roof over somebody's head whether the support is available or not. We have a local homelessness service improvement plan which has been agreed with the borough council and other departments to try and develop better support for people who are accepted as being homeless. The difficulty is, going back to the supporting people issue, in North Yorkshire only eight per cent of the supporting people budget is dedicated to homeless and to support projects compared with I think the national average is somewhere about 30 per cent. We are starting from a very historical low base and there are some real difficulties in terms of developing new projects. Fortunately, the county council has agreed to use the windfall money it has got from second homes to support housing in North Yorkshire and in Scarborough borough we have managed to get some short term revenue funding. Also, we are going to recruit somebody who has worked with young people to try and prevent a relationship breakdown and get people back home if they can. All that funding is two years in duration and my concern is that at the end of two years supporting people will not be able to pick it up and all the good work may go to waste. There is a lot of good work going on but supporting people and the lack of long term secure funding is definitely an issue. Q197 Christine Russell: As the housing manager for Harrogate, in your experience what are the best preventative measures? If you could wave a magic wand, what do you think is the best way of preventing people? Mr Williamson: It is early intervention. It is having the staff resources to identify potential homelessness at an early stage and work with individuals to explore different options, perhaps longer term or sustainable housing options and in doing so work with particularly parents and friends and relatives with whom potential applicants may be living currently. Like Scarborough we have some short term funding for mediation work, it is only short term but we have high hopes of that. What we have seen in the last two years with the extension of the protection of the 2002 Act is case loads increase dramatically, 50/60 per cent, staffing resources have not gone up anywhere near the same amount so by definition people are intervening later in potential homelessness cases whereas the objective prior to that had been earlier intervention which was more effective. Mr Sutton: Can I just add to that. I think early intervention is absolutely a priority and what I would like to see, you mention a magic wand, if we could get homeless or housing on the agenda in schools, we are talking about 11 years olds or possibly even younger, to raise the issue of housing, perhaps under the citizenship curriculum or something like that, I feel that is particularly an area in which we could do a lot of prevention work. Q198 Christine Russell: How proactive is Connexions in your locality? Mr Sutton: Connexions are reasonably well established. Q199 Chairman: That is not telling us whether they are any good. Mr Sutton: Connexions have proved very useful, certainly in delivering a homeless agenda. I can give an example. In September, Craven District Council, in partnership with others, held a homelessness expo which was all about raising the profile of homelessness and trying to get a message across to young people in the district. Connexions were able to put us in touch with relevant Connexions PAs and careers advisors in schools. Unfortunately we were not able to get the young people out of school to come to the event. It transpires that we are now able to take the event to the young people in the schools and I feel this is an area that in Craven we want to look at, explore and develop further. Q200 Chairman: Right. Can I take the Forum on to the question about are homeless statistics any good at all? Mr Sutton: I would like to answer that, if I may. I think they are good but they could be better. In terms of measuring homelessness statistics through the P1Es, for example - this is a well established thought I think - it does not give you a full picture. For example, 2003-04, Craven accepted 42 people as full duty homeless, we made a total of in the region of 150 decisions but we had over 200 people come through the door and make inquiries about homeless. So figures that go into the P1Es do not reflect necessarily what is going on at front line level and people coming through the door and making inquiries, accordingly there is perhaps a potential for that extra capacity to go under funded. Q201 Chairman: Sheffield Hallam University have done a piece of work for the Forum, is that right? Mr Sutton: Sheffield Hallam University have done a number of pieces of work in the region. Most recently was the report that was commissioned by Crisis and the Countryside Agency entitled Your Place Not Mine and that was looking particularly at hidden homelessness. The three areas it chose were London, Sheffield and Craven which is, as I said earlier, a large rural district. Q202 Chairman: Was the piece of work any good? Mr Sutton: The piece of work was good, yes. Q203 Chairman: What did it show? Mr Sutton: From Craven's perspective it showed a couple of very interesting points really. Of the homelessness people interviewed in Craven, approximately less than 50 per cent came down and presented at local authority. That was for two reasons. The first reason was because of pre-conceived ideas of what any outcome might be. Q204 Chairman: In other words, they thought it was useless coming to see you? Mr Sutton: In other words, yes. But perhaps more alarmingly was a significant number of them did not even know that the local authority had a duty to provide a homelessness service. It was this aspect that as the homelessness provider, post LSVT, we took on board, and we began to publicise the service. Q205 Chairman: What is the point of publicising the service if you cannot meet the need? Mr Sutton: I think by publicising the service you are going to generate perhaps a true need because there is a danger of under recording your need because people do not know about it. Q206 Chairman: If you record your need you might get the resources? Mr Sutton: That is the idea behind it. Q207 Mr Clelland: Do you consider the increase in homelessness in the Yorkshire and Humberside area to mirror national trends and what explanation do you have? Ms Henderson: There does seem to be a general increase in people presenting as homeless. I am not sure that we are confident as to the reasons why that is the case yet. The bottom line is providing that safeguard for people when they apply, and that we know when people come through the door they are given the appropriate treatment. I guess anecdotally we can say that the widening of the statutory homeless categories from the 2002 Act will have some influence but what most local authorities are saying to us, and members too, is that it is a general increase across the board, it is not just the new categories that have come in, whether that is partly about people being more aware of what help they can get or partly just the way to get housing is to present as homeless. Obviously in parts of the South East, the cost of the private rented sector is prohibitive. It is very complex as to why the numbers have gone up but I do not think the answer is to say it was because of the Act or because of a huge lack of accommodation. It is an addition of all those reasons. Ms Williams: Can I add to that? Picking up the point about the homelessness statistics as well, they show who local authorities have accepted a duty to. Beyond that, there are a large number of people in acute housing need who are not accepted as homeless, maybe they are over-crowded or they are single people who do not meet the vulnerability test. There is a huge level of acute housing need out there not being measured by homelessness statistics. Q208 Mr Clelland: Does Yorkshire and Humberside have any explanation as to why there has been a huge increase or a considerable increase? Mr Adamson: In Scarborough we have had increases because of the extension to the priority groups in the 2002 Act but also we have had a 300 per cent increase in landlords ending short hold tenancies, that seemed to be because of the price increases. It is not the large scale landlord, it is people who own one or two properties and they have decided "My house that I bought for £50,000 is now worth £150,000, I can get the tenant out and sell it". There have been a lot of homeless applications coming in from people who say the landlord wants to sell the property. Hopefully if the housing market is cooling down a bit that phenomenon might stop but a lot of landlords have been getting out of the market because they think they can get a better return for their money somewhere else. Q209 Mr Clelland: Are there particular specialist needs in the rural coastal areas? Mr Adamson: Yes. One of the challenges in Scarborough borough - it has three centres of population, there is Filey, Scarborough and Whitby - it is very difficult to provide services without people having to move to the services. There is not a very great incidence of homelessness in rural areas mainly because people who live 20 miles outside of Whitby know that if they come in, they will be offered accommodation in Whitby and they are not going to get back to the community where they lived originally. There is a scale issue, in terms of providing the services there are economies of scale. Rural districts do not have the centres of population that make some specialist services economically viable. Scarborough is 300 square miles so if you put the service somewhere in the middle people have got to come a hell of a long way to access that service and that is a feature right across North Yorkshire. Q210 Mr Clelland: What particular financial problems has the increase in homelessness created? Mr Adamson: Scarborough Council is predicting that its expenditure on bed and breakfast this year is going to be half a million pounds. As I used to work for the borough council and manage its homelessness service before stock transfer, that is more than double what I can ever remember a local authority spending on bed and breakfast in the past. The difficulty being, again as I said, the only provision for homeless families in Whitby is bed and breakfast, there is no hostel in Whitby. People in Whitby will not move 20 miles to move into a council's hostel in Scarborough, quite reasonably. Whitby probably is not big enough to sustain a homeless hostel so the council is working with ourselves and others to develop flexible housing that can be used as temporary accommodation for people who are homeless but if the demand is not there it could be let on a permanent basis to a permanent tenant. That is obviously a long term strategy that may take two or three years. Q211 Mr Clelland: Should there be changes in the way that homelessness services are paid for? Mr Adamson: Somebody has got to pay for them and at the end of the day it comes down to the taxpayer, whichever pot it comes out of. I am quite sure the local authority would love the Government to pay, even if they pay a cost, but whether that is reasonable or not, I do not know. Mr Williamson: Can I just add, the difficulty is that it is general fund expenditure and general fund expenditure is under pressure. Councils are faced with council tax capping. Let me just give you an example. A small district council in North Yorkshire, Ryedale which is based on Malden, the cost to them of bed and breakfast this year is equivalent to two per cent on the council tax. If you look at next year, and have to budget two per cent for bed and breakfast and three per cent for inflation and you are facing council tax capping of five per cent, there is not much room for manoeuvre. Q212 Mr Clelland: If, as a result of our inquiry, the Committee was to suggest to the Government that they should invest more money in housing projects that would benefit homeless people, what would be your top priority for projects as far as you are concerned? Mr Williamson: In North Yorkshire, there is no simple answer to the problem of homelessness because it is an acute symptom of the problem of affordability. The problem of affordability is not easily solvable. If we were looking at measures in the immediate term, it would need to be resourcing more temporary accommodation, hostels and more revenue support through supporting people. Beyond that you are looking at measures like restricting further the right to buy because it is not a coincidence that the increases in problems of affordability have coincided with councils selling 40 to 50 per cent of their housing stock over the past 25 years. As Richard says, the issue of the prevailing form of tenure in the private sector where there is an inherent insecurity in the form of tenure level, short hold tenancy. Q213 Mr Clelland: Do you think we concentrate too much on owner occupation rather than the rented sector? Mr Sutton: Yes, broadly speaking. Q214 Christine Russell: Finally, can I ask you what is a big question but please can you give us a short answer. There appears to be, amongst the members of the National Federation, huge variance in the way that the legislation and guidance regarding homeless applications is interpreted. Do you feel there is a need for ODPM to look again at the legislation and perhaps consider reviewing it? Ms Henderson: I think the legislation may be okay. I think we are waiting for a revision of the Code of Guidance. Q215 Christine Russell: How long have you been waiting for it? Ms Henderson: I am trying to think. It was mooted when I first started working for the Federation about two and a bit years. Ms Williams: For the new Homelessness Act. Ms Henderson: This is the new Homelessness Act Code of Guidance. I think that will help. On one of the issues it is used very differently by different areas. Q216 Christine Russell: Have you been given an indication as to when that may see the light of day? Ms Henderson: No. Chairman: On that note, can I thank you all very much for your evidence. |