Housing placements for homeless people too-often end unnecessarily, writes Ben Howarth, but with the right person-centred approach this doesn’t have to be the case
With homelessness rates in England recently hitting a five-year high, and the number of people living in temporary accommodation in England hitting a 25-year high, there is now a burning need to avoid the unnecessary ending of housing placements.
Housing placements can end for a variety of reasons, and tackling them is key to ensuring a high success rate.
Howarth Housing, along with LIFELINE (NW) CIC, provides emergency, temporary, and supported accommodation for the vulnerable and homeless in Manchester by working with local authorities, housing associations, charities, support groups, and private landlords, amongst others.
We have placed 652 men, women, and families in accommodation in 2023 alone, with 326 residents moved on to permanent residences and ZERO serious incidents involving staff/residents.
We also boast a significantly lower rate of placement endings than any other comparable organisation. Why is this?
Here are some of the various methods Howarth Housing employs to achieve such positive outcomes, along with advice for other housing organisations.
The use of detailed, dynamic risk assessments
Local authorities have to conduct a needs assessment on people requesting homelessness placements. These cover a wide range of considerations, and while risk level is part of this, it is quite often not properly explored.
Quite often, there will be third-party services involved, such as social services, probation, or community mental health teams.
But beyond collecting the basic information, it is less common for local authorities to directly contact the person to either confirm the information they have been provided, or seek further information to ensure that the risk assessment has been completed properly.
This can result in a poor-quality risk assessment that then leads to issues during placement that could have potentially been mitigated or avoided completely.
Housing organisations should work proactively with local authorities to encourage them to develop a more robust framework to ensure that the local authority is carrying out full and proper risk assessments.
Money management advice for clients
One of the primary reasons for presenting as homeless to local authorities is due to debt – usually rent, council tax and utility arrears. When people are placed in purely temporary accommodation, they are usually provided no support.
Due to the client being in temporary accommodation, those debts tend to fall silent as the companies cannot find the individual. However, when they are provided with a move-on property, they tend to be found, and debt collection continues, which can lead to them re-presenting as homeless again due to continuing debts.
Therefore, housing organisations should offer money management to clients at the earliest opportunity to help avoid this type of situation.
Quality 24/7 support and advice
Unfortunately, most local authorities don’t have the money or resources to carry out any form of real support.
It is often left to third-party services or supported accommodation providers, who are under increasing strain due to the requirement to provide better quality services, while simultaneously having payments continually challenged and cut.
This all leads to more and more re-presentations and providers failing. Over the last few months, a large number of providers have failed, such as Lotus, Gen Liv, Supportive Homes, and Redemption.
So, housing organisations should ensure tenants can access support from staff any time of day.
To do this, each resident should be allocated a key worker that they will work directly with, regardless of whether they are in a supported accommodation project or a temporary accommodation project.
The support worker will work with the tenant for their entire stay.
The key point here is that if any tenant is going through a crisis or has serious problems, we provide the necessary support when they need it.
This constant support helps tenants to maintain as stable a life as possible, and avoid unnecessary housing placement endings caused by manageable issues.
Good quality, self-contained accommodation
Placing clients in self-contained properties, having undergone thorough risk management and safeguarding procedures, allows tenants to experience a sense of normality in their time of need.
Moving clients into permanent residences is the end goal for everyone; however, it needs to be done properly with a good amount of consideration for the person’s ability to manage their own property.
By allowing them the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with domestic life again in a supported environment, this can drastically reduce the number of reoccurring homelessness.
A more personal approach to client needs
In an ideal world, each person would have a bespoke support package tailored to them; however, in today’s climate of cost-cutting measures, this is simply not possible.
This often results in an attempt to develop a one-size-fits-all model that, unfortunately, doesn’t really work for anyone.
Local authorities need to allow supported accommodation providers the freedom to develop individual programs that fit the individual needs, rather than following the black-and-white of the housing benefit regulations on what support should look like.
Most housing benefit departments have no real knowledge of what day-to-day support looks like, and as such often reject claims for “lack of support” due to their own opinion rather than following any specific guidance.
Ultimately, the personal approach is the best way to ensure a high success rate for housing placements, and housing organisations should consider implementing the advice above to achieve this.
Ben Howarth is founder and director of Howarth Housing Group
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