Service cuts, changes in housing benefit, reduced funding for Supporting People and new rules for disability benefits disproportionally affect social housing tenants and combine to reduce choice, threaten independence and undermine people’s dignity.
The choice for many elderly or disabled people will be become a burden for your family which you don’t want to do or go into a “Home” where you don’t want to go.
People have more control over their own lives and retain their independence in their own flat with their own front door. Where as in a residential home they quickly become institutionalised fitting into the routine of the place, doing not what they want to but what makes life easier for the staff.
The loss of choice and independence is quickly followed by the loss of dignity. It’s hard to retain a sense of self worth and pride when you are surrounded by confused and incontinent “Residents”, when you have no real privacy and when people are “Toiletted” before and after every communal meal and bathed once a fortnight.
Public sector budget cuts at a time of growth in the number of older and disabled people means that thoses without the money to buy care and support will endure rather than enjoy life.
The greatest post war achievement of the public sector was to extend life we now risk making thoses extra years a misery for many.
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Joe Halewood | 25/10/2010 2:29 pm
Supported housing will wither away and die because of the inept and offensive HB cuts and caps.
The MOST vulnerable will also die, literally, because of these cuts and caps.
That is the extent of the ignorance of this government of what supported housing is and comprises and how it is paid for.
Supported housing (note not sheltered housing) contains much accommodation-based services (ABS) such as hostels, refuges and group homes / communal living projects for those with mental health, learning difficulties and other ‘vulnerabilities (often called the supported living model or SLM).
When women and children flee violence or when floods, fire, etc., force people into homeless provision, they need furnished accommodation that is paid for through housing benefit in such ‘exempt accommodation’ provision.
The current proposals to take into account all welfare benefits and welfare reliefs, such as council tax benefit, away from the caps (£500pw for a family and £350pw for a single person) then the amount of HB that councils are allowed to pay won’t cover the gross rent at hostels, refuges and group homes.
Supported housing and the Supported Living Model will no longer be sustainable and such services will disappear as they can no longer be funded in the way they have been and the law says they should be.
The June mini budget was unclear whether the (original) HB cuts and caps would apply to supported housing. The consensus was this would be cleared up in the CSR last week. Supported housing is not mentioned in any of the CSR documents and so we must assume the HB cuts and caps and the overall benefit/relief caps will apply to supported housing.
If that is the case DV refuges will close as will homeless hostels as will group homes for other vulnerable people as they cannot be funded through HB despite the HB regulations saying they can, should be and ought to be.
Yet as usual the spin for public consumption (the alleged rationale) is general needs tenants in London who become the great unwashed / workless and other labelled persons and show yet again that these proposals are ill thought through. No government can afford to deliberately and knowingly close down DV refuges as this is political suicide, yet that is what these proposals will do.
That point alone reveals just how knee-jerk and offensive these proposals are and will be.
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