Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg joins warden debate as pressure group targets electoral candidates
Clegg: ‘Let elderly vote on wardens’
Housing providers should hand residents of sheltered housing schemes a vote before introducing plans to remove resident wardens, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has claimed.
Mr Clegg raised the idea in an exclusive interview with Inside Housing magazine.
He spoke out as it emerged that pressure group Sheltered Housing UK aims to make the subject of resident wardens an issue in every seat in the UK. It is contacting every parliamentary candidate to ask them whether they support the campaign to retain live-in wardens in sheltered schemes.
t will forward the list of supportive candidates to its members to help them decide which party to vote for.
A number of providers which have tried to remove the wardens are facing legal challenges from residents over the moves.
Now Mr Clegg has waded into the debate. He said that ‘lots of people who move into sheltered housing do expect a 24-hour warden’.
‘I rather like the idea Help the Aged have come up with about putting changes to warden services to a vote of affected residents,’ Mr Clegg added. ‘That’s the kind of good practice I hope more housing associations and councils will use.’
Sheltered Housing UK has so far had replies from 63 candidates backing its campaign to protect wardens but has not yet written to everyone standing for election. Twelve Labour candidates, 19 Liberal Democrats, seven Conservatives plus four English Democrats, one British National Party, 14 UKIP, and three candidates from other parties.
Vernon Yarker, chair of Sheltered Housing UK, said giving tenants a vote ‘would be better than the present system which is consultations’.
Imogen Parry, director of policy for the Essential Role of Sheltered Housing, which represents some sheltered housing providers, said: ‘ERoSH believes that services in sheltered housing can be provided through a range of models, not just through schemes with resident wardens.’ She said research by older people’s housing association Hanover said many people ‘neither want nor value 24-hour on-site management services’.
Mr Clegg also revealed the Liberal Democrats would not protect the housing budget if it gained power. ‘There is no way we can get rid of Britain’s enormous deficit without looking across all government departments for savings,’ he said.
See the full interview with Nick Clegg
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Readers' comments (10)
vernony | 23/04/2010 10:13 am
As usual ERoSH seem out of touch and out of sync. The expectation of Sheltered Housing is a site specific Warden. Not necessarily 24/7 but at least the same standard that applied when residents first moved into it. To unilaterally remove a warden, without resident approval after residents had committed their future to it is fraud !
Hanover is a Registered Provider of Sheltered Housing, we have not seen their research, or how the questions were phrased. Conversely the Sheltered Housing UK has carried out its own survey and all of the questions we asked residents are published in the SHUK Report and 97% said they would not have moved into Sheltered Housing if they had known that the Warden would be taken away afterwards.
The above is borne out by reports from housing providers who now claim that they have voids in Sheltered Housing which are very difficult to fill. In turn this has led to change of use or demolition.
Sheltered Housing is, or was, a tremendous national asset and it is being wasted. With and estimated 7% expected to have been lost between 2003 and 2011 but their are signs that this is accelerating.
Often where a Sheltered scheme has gone over to some kind of floating staff arrangement and the same staff are also employed in the wider community then the difference in the service cover between those in Sheltered Housing and those in the wider community is eroded.
Even though both types of tenure are now equal, housing providers still maintain that they are running Sheltered Housing. In the event, it is my opinion that they are frightened for political and social reasons to admit that thousands of Sheltered schemes throughout the country are being misdescribed and they no longer fulfill that function. I wonder what the national press would make of it, if they understood the issues ?
What too would they make of the thousands of communal rooms in which once activities took place for the benefit of the residents and now lay empty and unused because the Warden who organised things no longer exists.
For an update on the article above, now we have over 100, cross party,candidate MPs who have pledged their support to us and the number rises daily. Their names and constituencies are published on our website. Our National Survey of residents can also be made available on request although we do have to ask for a reproduction cost.
We have twice asked ERoSH to join with us and help save Sheltered Housing and protect vulnerable residents living there. Unfortunately they have declined
At one time a rival name (ERoWSH) (The Essential Role of Wardens In Sheltered Housing) was suggested, but we do not wish to be antagonistic towards them, we still hold to the principle that one day they will work with us !
Sincerely
Vernon J Yarker
Chairman
The Sheltered Housing UK Association
www.shelteredhousinguk.com
mailbox@shelteredhousinguk.com
twitter.com/shukassociation
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Joe Halewood | 23/04/2010 10:53 am
Is this the same Imogen Parry and same ERoSH that said politicians are NOT aware of the role of sheltered housing!!! Wasnt that precisely the point ERoSH were making in a letter here just last week?
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Dave Hollins | 23/04/2010 11:07 am
Nick Clegg's position is just dishonest. He makes it clear housing budgets will not be protected then says there will be a ballot on removing wardens - which is happening because budgets are already insufficient. So who will stump up when the ballot rejects the proposal to take the warden away? It will just leave providers with costs they cannot afford. Hopeless.
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vernony | 23/04/2010 12:51 pm
Hello Dave. Yes there does seem to be an incompatibility there. I don't see how the can do one thing without the other. I don't think it is only a question of the housing budget either, a duty of care is involved for the elderly too.
As I have oft said before if a branch of a tree, in a public place, were to fall down and injure or kill somebody, the HSE would be down on them like a ton of bricks and there would also be claims for compensation.
However, it seems
that the law is not equal in respect of the elderly. If somebody dies ( and there have been cases) in Sheltered Housing in a situation where the site specific warden had been removed, but would otherwise probably have been able to save them, duty of care seems to go out of the window, and the HSE go tactically blind
Vernon J Yarker
Chairman
The Sheltered Housing UK Association
www.shelteredhousinguk.com
mailbox@shelteredhousinguk.com
twitter.com/shukassocation
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Anne Jepson | 24/04/2010 1:27 pm
Dear Dave Hollins,
Perhaps before we start sobbing for the poor housing providers who "cannot afford" to provide wardens, we should note that many of them are reporting annual surpluses in the region of £3.2 million or more. It is not at all uncommon for the CEO of one of these Housing Associations to take home more than £100,000 a year. (Indeed, it has been reported in a national paper that seven of them take home more than the Prime Minister.) And please note that in many cases when the wardens are taken away, the service charges are not reduced.
Their promotional literature promises "the reassurance of knowing there is someone nearby in case of emergency." So elderly people trustingly move in, assuming these promises are true. It is only after their bridges are burnt that they realise that "someone nearby" actually means an operator in a call centre many miles away. The most common reply that the residents get to any request for assistance is, "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."
Promise a service - collect service charges - fail to provide the service - take home large surplus. Sounds to me as if the housing providers are on to a pretty good thing here!
And because they grow so rich and powerful (off of vulnerable elderly people's savings or the unsuspecting taxpayer), the local authorities do nothing but bow and scrape, approving everything they do. So it is quite meaningless when the DCLG simply says, "this is a matter for the local authorities". The local authorities simply look the other way and whistle nonchalantly, hoping nobody will notice.
Thus thousands of vulnerable British citizens are trapped in an endless round-robin in which no one looks after their interests at all. Their generation had to suffer in silence once, and their steadfast courage saved us a free country to grow up in. Now those in authority simply turn around and say, "OK - your turn to suffer in silence again. Just get on with it, please, and stop bothering us."
So vulnerable adults are stuffed away like helpless little bunnies in hutches that the children lost interest in and forgot to look after. The man who was left dead for ten years in Bristol shows exactly how much attention the "Floating Wardens" are paying to the welfare of the residents under their care.
This country needs to look again at Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Best wishes,
Anne Jepson (researcher into the conditions in Sheltered Housing for the past six years).
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HAPPIANT | 25/04/2010 10:46 pm
Just a quick response to Vernon J.Yarker of the SHUK.
Hanover no longer refer to Sheltered Housing, but rather use the designation of Retirement Housing.
Futher, Hanover's research is available to anyone who is interested, directly from their website or by request to the Research Department. All FREE of course.
HAPPIANT is a resident of Hanover.
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Joe Halewood | 26/04/2010 12:08 pm
Anne, the issue is not how much money or reserves or surpluses RSLs make, the issue is they should not cross subsidise resident wardens. SP was very very specific in its rules that the costs of any service be it a resident warden or any other support staff costs be transparent and break even.
To explain in very simple terms prior to SP and THB the costs of resident warens and sheltered housign in general contained subsidies. Briefly, all general needs tenancies were charged say 50p extra per week and the revenue this produced went towards subsidising the cost of a resident warden. That model was very typical across the country for all social landlords. SP did not allow those subsidies to continue.
As such the costs, the full costs of a resident warden needed to be borne by the residents who receive that service - and not that cost be subsidised or cross-subsidised as it was before. That principle must be upheld as it is right else it is discriminatory.
However, SP rules allowed the previous subsidies and cross subsidies pre-SP to be claimed separately and was known as the 'unpooled' costs if these unpooled costs were for a council or stock-transferred landlords but NOT to all of the RSLs.
So the vast majority of HAs were left with cross subsidised costing systems that they couldnt reclaim and with tenancy agreements that said (or strongly implied) that a warden had to be resident (eg Circle 33 and Garbet) and/or the charges they made for such a service didnt meet the costs of that service.
Under SP rules they were NOT allowed to just continue to cross subsidise and so the service levels had to meet the available funding.
Or, in very simple terms HAs with the exception of stock-transfer organisations were discriminated against in the rules concernign the unpooled income (the cross subsidy) that central government knew were in place.
This is a mess now and that mess central government and all stakeholders knew would happen at some time in the future after 2003 yet just buried their heads in the sands.
So - while such HAs have buried their heads in the sands too, the principal fault lies with SP systemically and central government. Further when such services were reviewed by local government their SP teams should - under national guidance - have noted that not enough funding was received and increased that level of funding. Unfortunately they didnt do this as central government didnt provide any additional funding - in fact they reduced it.
The very regrettable state of affairs has been known since 2001 yet nobody has done anything about it due to its political sensitivity and its a systemic cock-up of the highest order. Even more regrettably, its the poor vulnerable people at the bottom of this top-down directed system - the tenant- that has ended up being shafted.
Just as a postscript this is the real reason why 110,000 fewer 'older people' were supported by SP funding after its first 3 years.
So while some landlords do have blame attached the real issue is the systemic flaws in the funding arrangements in SP that is the root cause of this sorry mess.
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Hi Happiant | 27/04/2010 2:03 pm
Hi Happiant . Indeed for the past four years the title sheltered housing has been according to the TSA defunct. So when I challenged the DCLG and asked them why they have created a Ministerial Sheltered Housing Working Group, they said the name still exists.
Thus, we still refer to it as Sheltered Housing and Wardens as Wardens, you can change names as much as you wish, provided you do not change the tenure along with the name.
In early stages some of our strongest support came from Hanover in Hackney and I have been given to understand believe the possibility of litigation is being investigated at this moment, in respect of Hanover there
Yours sincerely
Vernon Yarker
Chair
SHUK
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vernony | 27/04/2010 2:19 pm
Hello Joe,
The original, or additional fault, was in Rentrestructuring which forbade rent pooling which helped to pay for the smaller Sheltered Units. Compounded now by Supporting People who, I supposem are only doing their job according to their remit.
As you say the villain is the Government who blame Supporting People i.e.
local government for the problems of Sheltered Housing, which of course it is not. It was a very clever move actually to thwart a backlash. The residents in individual Sheltered homes throughout the regions cannot muster enough voting power to persuade local government to provide properly for Sheltered Housing and, in effect, are powerless.
The above is, hence the reason for SHUK, which can unite residents across the country and in that way hopefully influence Government itself . I don't know if you have seen our website recently, but the results of a canvass of candidate MPs has been very encouraging and their names and the constituencies they are standing for have been published. There are still more coming in too
regards
Vernon Yarker
Chair
SHUK
www.shelteredhousinguk.com
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The ONLY One | 28/04/2010 2:41 pm
Anne - why should an RSL cross subsidise different parts of it's business to make them viable?? Has the responsibility for the provision of support to older persons passed from the Govnt to housing providers now? If so I missed that bit of legislation! Clearly you need to research WHY this support is missing (a BIG clue - check out the Supporting People changes with the removal of ringfencing and LAAs).
Happiant - thanks for the promotiional advert for Hanover HA, but you fail to note what research you are highlighting - is it specifically to do with the removal of Wardens (or scheme managers, court managers, estate managers, any other name now given to the role)? In which case I seem to recall that Hanover removed some resident wardens, sold the properties, and provided 'mobile' or 'floating' support in it's place, exactly the opposite to what is being discussed here.
However, if Mr Clegg is quoting tenants as saying they "expect a 24 hour warden" then this is not provided in sheltered per se (even resident wardens can go off site outside thier contracted hours!), however in extra care housing then a 24 hour is provided, and as yet is not affected by this topic.
So, what is the story here?
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