Breaking the habit
Drug problems are hard to tackle when rehabilitated addicts are forced to return to their old neighbourhoods. Lydia Stockdale visits one housing association that’s helping them escape the ghosts of their past and make a fresh start.
Having stable accommodation has been amazingly important. If it hadn’t been for Trent & Dove Housing I’d have had to go back to Stoke where all the madness was and I probably would have lasted about a week,’ says Paul Hughes, a rehabilitated addict who is now happy and settled with a fiancée and child in Burton on Trent.
Mr Hughes, a former client of BAC O’Connor, an abstinence-based drug and alcohol rehabilitation organisation in Staffordshire, believes that it would not have such a high success rate - 79 per cent of clients recover - if housing association Trent & Dove didn’t offer them accommodation at the end of the centre’s 18-week rehabilitation programme.
‘I’d say that nine out of 10 people would be straight back to addiction if they went back to the area they’re from,’ he estimates.
Trent & Dove, which has owned and managed more than 5,000 homes since it took on East Staffordshire Council’s housing stock after a transfer in 2001, began its partnership with BAC O’Connor the following year. ‘BAC O’Connor was having real problems moving people on [from the centre],’ recalls Jane Stokes, independent living manager at Trent & Dove. ‘Clients were going through the rehabilitation programme and there was nowhere to go because their [housing] applications weren’t being dealt with quickly enough.’
For some clients this meant returning to the area they were from, and to the ghosts of their past. Old habits die hard, especially when local drug dealers discover they’re back.
The lack of available housing was also causing a bottleneck at BAC O’Connor. Those who had finished rehabilitation were waiting for somewhere to move on to, meaning there wasn’t room for new clients who desperately needed to start receiving help from centre, which now has 65 beds.
People with drug and alcohol addictions are referred to BAC O’Connor through social services, their probation officer or GP, or they approach the centre directly. Most clients come from Staffordshire, but BAC O’Connor has also treated people from Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham and Cheshire. ‘There aren’t that many abstinence-based rehab centres in the country,’ explains Karen Wilde, spokesperson for BAC O’Connor, of the demand for its services.
Priority placement
In order to move BAC O’Connor’s clients into housing quickly, Trent & Dove reviewed its allocations system. ‘[Previously] our priority banding system only kept [BAC O’Connor clients] in bands two or three,’ explains Ms Stokes. ‘In order to make those leaving BAC O’Connor a high priority they needed to be in band one. So the housing association made it possible for them to go straight through to the highest priority band one,’ she says. All it takes is a letter from BAC O’Connor.
In order to get to know these new tenants, independent living officer Anne Ashcroft and her colleagues visit the centre every two weeks. They interview the clients to find out more about their personal circumstances. This enables them to go away and start finding appropriate housing in a suitable area.
‘We do our bit while they are going through the treatment,’ says Ms Ashcroft of the work the Trent & Dove team are doing while BAC O’Connor clients complete the rehabilitation programme.
During their final weeks at the centre, all service users are assessed as to whether they are ready to live independently. If they are deemed fit to leave, BAC O’Connor will write a letter of support to Trent & Dove and this bumps the client’s application for housing, lodged at the beginning of their treatment, up to band one. They are usually housed within two weeks.
If a client is not ready to live on their own, they are offered an en-suite room in BAC O’Connor’s ‘move-on’ house called 130, which has 12 bed spaces, and where clients are gradually taught how to deal with everyday life.
‘Because a lot of people have lived with addiction for so long, they’ve never learned those skills, so at 130 it’s teaching clients how to live independently, before they move on to Trent & Dove housing,’ says BAC O’Connor’s Ms Wilde.
Road to independence
Once they’re housed, BAC O’Connor offers 24-hour floating support to clients for two years. Usually, they visit the centre once a week and support workers go to see them at intervals.
‘It starts off at once a week, then it goes to fortnightly and then it goes to monthly,’ says Bryn Corbett who left in November. ‘It’s a slow process. They come to see if you’re getting better, dealing with your problems, paying your bills and everything.’
Some BAC O’Connor clients, like Mr Hughes’s fiancée Jacqueline, who says she used to be ‘a binge drinker’, are already Trent & Dove tenants. ‘If our tenants do choose to access the BAC O’Connor rehabilitation programme, we will keep their tenancy open for them,’ says Ms Stokes. BAC O’Connor receives service users’ housing benefit and when Trent & Dove is keeping a property available for a client, it pays the benefit money back to the housing association.
Since 2002, Trent & Dove has offered former BAC O’Connor clients 104 tenancies. Just 10 have been evicted. Meanwhile, the support team at the housing association has grown from one person to six people.
BAC O’Connor has two centres, the one in Burton and another in Newcastle-under-Lyme in north Staffordshire, and is keen to work with other housing associations. It has already struck up a partnership with Aspire in north Staffordshire and wants to build more relationships based on the model with Trent & Dove.
‘The aim of BAC O’Connor is to help people back into the mainstream after battling addiction,’ sums up Trent & Dove’s Ms Stokes. ‘By working together we help with that stable environment and housing so people can rebuild their lives. ‘And,’ she adds gesturing to the soon-to-be Mr and Mrs Hughes and their six-month-old daughter, ‘now we’ve got a little family out of it.’
Independent: Bryn Corbett
When Bryn Corbett, 28, left BAC O’Connor’s Burton centre last November, his life had changed dramatically. When he started treatment less than a year earlier, in December 2008, he was ‘eight and a half stone and on death’s door’.
‘I’ve done everything. It started off with aerosols, but it built up. I swapped between heroin and alcohol,’ he says.
Moving away from Burntwood in south Staffordshire was vital to his recovery. ‘Since I moved to Burton I’ve got my own flat. I walk around with my head up high. I’ve got no problems with the people around here. It’s like being born again,’ he states. ‘I’ve had to learn to do everything all over again. I’ve never lived on my own so when I went through the centre, I learned how to cook, clean, iron.’
Mr Corbett lived in 130, BAC O’Connor’s ‘move-on house’, for five months before he moved into Trent & Dove housing association accommodation. ‘One day it clicked in my head that I was ready, and I got all the support [I needed]. It was nerve-wracking to start but I got into that pattern, getting up doing things like painting and decorating and I appreciate it a lot more because I did it myself.
‘I look back and think, “It’s been 18 months and I’ve got all of this”. I’ve got my family to support me, we have our ups and downs but now we’ve got the communication back.’
First family home: Paul Hughes
Source: Fabio De Paola
New life: Paul Hughes, with fiancee Jacqueline and their six-month old daughter
Paul Hughes, 32, left the BAC O’Connor centre in Burton on Trent as a client three years ago. ‘You turn up there in a million little pieces you come out ever-thankful,’ he says.
‘It’s an abstinence programme, so it teaches you that you can’t take anything at all - you can’t drink and you can’t take drugs.’
Former drink and drugs addict, Mr Hughes, now a chef at BAC O’Connor, first met his wife-to-be Jacqueline, 38, when they were both clients there. They struck up a relationship later when they were housed opposite each other.
‘We knew each other but there are no relationships in BAC O’Connor,’ he says. ‘It’s been 10 or 15 years [of addiction]. Your emotions have been numb,’ he says.
While Mr Hughes was on BAC O’Connor’s rehabilitation programme, he was asked what he would like to do as a job; he said he would like to be a chef. ‘They got me a grant for my chef knives and outfits, got me into college and this was while I was still in treatment,’ he recalls.
‘When I completed my [rehabilitation] programme, there were houses available, but in bad areas. So I stayed at 130 until there was a decent flat available in a good area - they housing association [Trent & Dove] won’t just put you anywhere.’
The couple and their baby daughter are now in the process of moving out of their separate flats and into a newly built Trent & Dove house - their first family home.
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