Supported Housing

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I will be very brief; as I said when I apologised to you earlier, I have to leave to go to a funeral in Bedford.

I share the concern outlined in the Select Committees’ joint report that the Government do not seem to be aware of the impact of their funding proposals on the supported housing sector. Some vital support services —often those for the most vulnerable—depend on discretionary funding from local authorities. The home- lessness charity Emmaus provides a home and meaningful work to more than 750 formerly homeless people across the UK. It has a community in Carlton, about 10 miles from my constituency, and has helped many rough sleepers in Bedford. The chairman of its board, Frank McMahon, recently wrote to me to outline his concerns about its future.

Much support for homeless people provides them with only a bed for the night and a hot meal. The next morning, they are back on the streets. The Emmaus model is sustainable and yields fantastic results. Many of the men and women who join an Emmaus community are not job-ready, but they gain skills and experience that often help them to gain employment when they move on. Although the Government’s proposals state that funding for supported housing costs will be ring-fenced, there is real concern that that will be difficult to guarantee in the long term.

Many supported housing providers have faced severe financial hardship since the removal in 2009 of the ring fence for the Supporting People programme. It is imperative that funding for housing costs does not follow a similar path. Introducing competition for funding for women’s refuges or schemes such as Emmaus is risky and short-sighted. Providing housing is very different from running a service, yet someone who read the report might think the Government were talking about commodities, not vulnerable people with complex problems and past traumas to overcome.

A Women’s Aid survey of refuge providers found that a one-size-fits-all funding model for short-term accommodation would force more than half of refuges to close or reduce their provision, resulting in 4,000 more women and children being turned away from the life-saving services they desperately need. Removing short-term accommodation from the mainstream benefits system would mean that residents in supported accommodation no longer had a right to claim housing benefit, and removing the financial underpinning of a rent agreement between landlord and tenant would risk undermining residents’ security. Rather than adopt a localised commissioning model for supported housing, the Government should use existing housing benefit arrangements as the basis of a new funding model, with enhanced regulation, auditing and cost control.