Supported Housing

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating this debate, which complements the one taking place in the Chamber. We are also grateful to her for raising the concerns of many housing associations and their clients, who come under the broad umbrella of “supported housing”. Many of these groups are vulnerable: they are rough sleepers, refugees, young offenders and those recovering from alcohol and drug issues.

I remember going to visit, nearly 50 years ago, the first women’s refuge in Chiswick, run by the formidable Erin Pizzey. I listened to the problems that confronted her: it was not just that the local residents were not entirely happy about the refuge but that Hounslow council was trying to close the operation. Principally, she had to juggle a range of revenue streams simply to keep the show on the road.

Since then, we have had a whole variety of funding regimes. In the consultative Funding Supported Housing policy statement, the funding regimes were summed up with some beautiful Civil Service-speak:

“Funding for supported housing is complex and comes from a variety of sources, with ‘housing’ costs and ‘support’ costs being met separately.”


I pause there because none of the institutions from which some of the residents have come—young offender institutions, prison or NHS in-patient support for drug addiction—has to grapple with separate funding regimes. Indeed, those running them would be horrified if they had to do what the voluntary sector has to do and run the organisation using a whole range of streams.

In my view, the most successful regime was the supporting people regime, introduced in 2003, with £1.8 billion ring-fenced for local authorities to support people who wanted to live independently. Since then, we have progressively moved away from that regime. In 2009, the ring-fence was removed, despite warnings from the Select Committee down the other end that this would expose “electorally unpopular” groups. Once the ring-fence was removed, the institutions and support organisations had to compete with more electorally popular bids for local authority funds.

We have now arrived at the position that the noble Baroness explained, where exempt housing benefit meets the management costs of these projectsand the top-up for the extra support comes from the local authorities. Both those legs are subject to criticism. As the noble Baroness explained, the top-up has been progressively squeezed, with the pressure on local authorities leaving no support for the one-to-one help that is often needed for these clients and with the exempt housing benefit being exploited, as was explained. The noble Lord, Lord Best, may talk a little more about the less scrupulous providers, who come to the local authority armed with lawyers to argue their case. If care is provided in some of those institutions, it comes out of the universal credit of the person claiming, not out of the other resources.

The basic question for the Minister is: is she satisfied with the current regime and how it is working? If not, is she prepared to look at options for reform? There is some concern, which we heard, that where we are at the moment is not the optimum way of running supported housing.