How Scottish associations have transformed services to protect communities

Wheatley Group – Scotland’s largest housing, care and property management group – has delivered more than 5,800 food parcels to vulnerable customers in the past month.

The group’s EatWell service provides emergency food each week to vulnerable people in its communities who are self-isolating or facing hardship and have no other support.

The service has been massively expanded during the crisis, with three new distribution centres opened, and it has been awarded £350,000 from the Scottish government to provide a further 8,500 food parcels across Scotland over the next three months.

Queens Cross Housing Association’s well-being service for people aged 60-plus helps around 425 older people in North West Glasgow to manage their tenancies.

It also supports older people when they’re ill, working alongside hospital discharge teams and Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, so people can stay safely in their own homes.

The association has recently increased its support for older residents by achieving a ‘care at home’ registration with the Care Inspectorate.

“We’ve been incredibly impressed by how our members in Scotland have quickly responded by adapting and increasing the support they offer and even introducing new services”

This means its ‘well-being workers’ can now provide service users with personal care such as bathing, showering, dressing and other essential needs.

It is also working closely with social care services to identify and support people whose care packages have been reduced or changed as a result of the pandemic.

Berwickshire Housing Association is using money generated by its wind farm project to fund grants for vulnerable households affected by the coronavirus crisis as well as supporting food banks and community groups.

Fife Housing Group has made cash donations to local food banks and has set up a charitable framework with its contractors, which donate 2% of their invoiced costs to fund community benefit projects.

Our role at SFHA is to support our members to do this work, and we are doing everything in our power to ensure this happens.

Communication and relationships have continued to be our touchstones – communicating and maintaining relationships with our staff, members and stakeholders as well as building new relationships.

Since the start of the outbreak in Scotland, we have been having daily discussions with politicians and leaders at the highest levels in government, regulation and the finance sector, so our members can continue to thrive as social businesses.

Following conversations with the Scottish government and the Scottish Housing Regulator, we brought together the Social Housing Resilience Group (SHRG) to ensure national-level responses to local level needs. The SHRG aims to deal with the significant challenges the outbreak is causing so that social landlords can continue to provide the support that their tenants and communities need.

Key issues for the group include personal protective equipment, safe lettings protocols, homelessness, gas safety, key workers, humanitarian support and sector income reduction.

Like all organisations across the UK, we have also had to completely rethink and refocus the way we work at SFHA to ensure we provide our members with the support they need.

This has meant business reorientation, so we concentrate on the most important issues and identify the best ways to stay connected. We have introduced several digital platforms that enable us to find out what our members need, so we can deliver it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We have created a digital forum where senior staff from our membership can discuss the outbreak, ask questions, and share advice and information.

“While looking ahead for the real and lasting changes we need is critical, we have to ensure we keep our attention on the immediate and urgent priorities”

We have also produced a series of briefing notes that we have made available to member and non-member organisations in order to help the sector to navigate the crisis. These briefings have included information on health and safety, service delivery, Universal Credit, and care and support.
It’s not only our current working practices that have gone digital – our events have, too.

While we have had to postpone our events and conferences programme, we have held a series of webinars for our members that focus on different aspects of the pandemic.

We’re now in phase two – the second period of lockdown or what has become, for now, ‘the new normal’ – and things have settled, in relative terms.

And, despite all the talk of recovery, for me, we’re still very much in the response phase.

While looking ahead for the real and lasting changes we need is critical, we have to ensure we keep our attention on the immediate and urgent priorities.

For the next few weeks, I anticipate that our focus must remain on responding, and reacting, in real time.

For SFHA, this means delivering for our members. For the housing sector in Scotland, it means keeping staff and tenants safe and maintaining and building personal and professional communities and connections.

And, for all of us, it means keeping hopeful.

Sally Thomas, chief executive, Scottish Federation of Housing Associations