Sheltered Accommodation

Margot James Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you this morning, Mr Chairman. I first wish to thank all Members who have given up their time this morning to debate the very important matter of sheltered housing.

According to the most recent English housing survey, 610,000 mainly older people live in sheltered accommodation. As a sector, sheltered housing has something of a mixed reputation. Some sheltered housing is old and provides bedsit accommodation, which is increasingly hard to let. At its worst, it has provided councils with an opportunity to house hard-to-place tenants—for example, people with drug and alcohol problems—and unsurprisingly that is upsetting for the conventional older tenants for whom the schemes were originally intended. At the other end of the sheltered market there are high-quality flats available for lease purchase and renting. What all those options have in common, however, is the availability of services that are promised as part of the housing entitlement.

I digress for just a minute to remind Members of the next big thing in older people’s accommodation: extra-care homes. Some Members might already have such establishments in their constituencies. My own borough of Dudley is opening several extra-care homes next year. These establishments promise services that tenants and owner-occupiers can avail themselves of on a flexible basis, according to their age, mobility and mental state. The important thing is that the services are available; that is what people will buy into. Although they might not, at first, need a carer to visit them regularly or to have mobility aids in their flat, as they age and their needs change they will be able to access that additional support as part of the package. Does that sound familiar? Although the services offered in extra-care homes are more diverse and far-ranging than those provided by most sheltered housing schemes, the principle is the same. Someone pays the money, and as their needs increase they are guaranteed access to greater support.

On the basis of trends in the sheltered market in recent years, I would say, “Buyer beware.” In sheltered housing, those essential services are being eroded over time. The tenant or leaseholder—this happens in both the private and the social sector—moves into their accommodation on one basis, thinking they will be secure in their old age, only to find that as time goes by the management organisation starts to whittle away the services on which they depend. The distress caused to older tenants and leaseholders by the various changes, in some cases forced upon them by their housing provider, is as great as it is unjust. Several types of service are affected, but the most controversial is warden support.

Research by the Sheltered Housing UK Association found that 97% of residents surveyed said that their decision to move into sheltered housing had been influenced most of all by the presence of a live-in warden. A Help the Aged report, entitled “Nobody’s Listening”, found that 67% of Supporting People administering authorities felt that warden services were the most important aspect of sheltered housing for older residents.

Not everyone agrees. Imogen Parry, director of policy for the Essential Role of Sheltered Housing, which represents housing providers, said that her organisation believes that

“sheltered housing can be provided through a range of models”

—I am sure it can—

“not just through schemes with resident wardens.”

She then quotes from research by Hanover, one of the housing providers:

“Many people neither want nor value 24-hour on-site management services”.

So that will be why tenants in Barnet and Portsmouth have taken their local authorities to court for threatening to move from on-site to floating warden support.

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate on this very important issue. Residents in my constituency are equally concerned about losing warden services, but the problem is twofold. The full service is being taken away, leaving only a nine-to-five service, and people are being asked to pay an additional charge when the service was part of the overall package they had when they moved in. They are losing on both counts.

[Margot James]

I very much agree with the hon. Lady. It is true that elderly people buy into these schemes and originally have an on-site warden service. As she says, not only is that taken away, made off-site and shared by various other housing organisations, but it used to be free and is now chargeable. So, the service is getting worse and the fees are increasing in many cases.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

In Portsmouth, we have an additional problem to the wardens—whom the court case was about—in that bathing and other services are being charged for. This is all happening at once, and many elderly men and women are extremely frightened at the prospect of their bills going up by £20 a week or more.

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We must not forget that most of these residents and tenants are on fixed incomes. They have bought into the schemes on one basis, and a promise has been broken. I shall come on a little later to some of the options available to people in that position. Judicial reviews of decisions by housing providers have also been sought by tenants in no fewer than 50 housing schemes in 20 authorities. That gives the lie to the assertion by the housing providers that their residents “neither want nor value” on-site management services.

We are talking about a vulnerable group of people, many of whom are on fixed incomes. Many people in that situation are increasingly frail and are no match for large housing organisations and their teams of lawyers, which is presumably why some companies—charities even, which I find very surprising—have attempted to impose the sort of changes we have heard about this morning on leases and tenancy agreements, without consultation. Although the change that has caused the most distress is the replacement of a live-in warden service with an off-site visiting manager—with whom it is necessary to make an appointment, which is often charged for, even though it was free according to the terms of the original agreement—other changes such as the national procurement of local services and escalating management charges with no associated improvement in the service offered are also a big problem for owner-occupiers in the leasehold sector.

I was first alerted to this problem by two constituents of mine in Stourbridge, who do not wish to be named. They had bought into sheltered accommodation on a leasehold basis. A charity ran the establishment, along with several hundred other establishments nationwide. The charity has substituted the live-in warden service that was free at the point of use with a visiting service shared with other organisations, with which they have to make an appointment and for which they are charged. They have also suffered escalating management charges, and a housing provider that decided to procure nationally every single service. Such a system takes away any local connection and removes the resident’s empowerment and ability to effect improvements by making a phone call or spotting the window cleaner and having a word. Even window cleaning, garden maintenance and lift maintenance are nationally procured, and the excuse given to the residents is that that is under EU law. We have investigated and that is not the case. There is a way round the problem, and EU law does not force national procurement on organisations of that size. Nevertheless, that is what residents are being told.

After I raised the issue during Prime Minister’s questions in July, a family from Folkestone approached me. Their elderly mother was a tenant in an establishment managed by Peverel, which manages a large number of housing organisations country-wide. Again, the issue was the substitution of the live-in warden system. None of the residents wanted that, but Peverel said, “We’re going to sell the flat where the warden lives because we can’t find anyone to do the work. We will donate £10,000 from the proceeds of the sale into your management fund.” That is absolutely derisory, but when the residents challenged it, Peverel turned around and said, “We are under no obligation to do this—take it or leave it.”

Endless complaints appear in the press about Peverel. One of its tactics is to use myriad service organisations of its own, including insurance companies. It then foists the delivery of services by those companies on the residents in its apartments at a charge that is higher than the market rate. That creates a conflict of interest unless there are clear rules of transparency, so that residents can get competitive tenders and ensure that they are not being overcharged for their services.

One gentleman, Neil Healey, managed to take a subsidiary company of Peverel to court over such issues, and he won a case against Solitaire Property Management. Peverel does not exclusively provide sheltered accommodation, and the picture in the paper of Mr Healey shows he is a young man—32 years old. A man of that age is perhaps better equipped to take large housing organisations to court than many of the frail older tenants who are my concern this morning.

A survey by the Bristol older people’s forum showed that more than two thirds of elderly people who live in the Bristol sheltered accommodation sector state that their quality of life is now worse than it was when there was a resident warden. Furthermore, 83% of pensioners in sheltered housing say that the services provided by their council are now worse, and 68% say their quality of life has suffered.

I am pleased to note that the Deputy Prime Minister spoke in support of this cause. Sheltered Housing UK wrote to him a month ago, putting pressure on the Government to introduce rules to ensure that residents and tenants have a right to be consulted when changes to the terms of their leasehold and tenancy agreements are proposed. In response, the Deputy Prime Minister wrote that

“lots of people who move into sheltered housing do expect a 24-hour warden…I rather like the idea Help the Aged has come up with about putting changes to warden services to a vote of affected residents…That’s the kind of good practice I hope more housing associations and councils will use.”

[Penny Mordaunt]

Certainly in Portsmouth, and I am sure elsewhere, I am concerned that a tactic is being adopted whereby companies that have been taken to court for not consulting people now consult local residents, but still leave them with the bill. In that way they dodge the political bullet for effectively withdrawing the service. I pay tribute to my constituent, Ingrid Savir, who is older than 32 but has been extremely dynamic and has spearheaded the campaign that sued Portsmouth city council.

[Margot James]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and I am most heartened by her example. I stress that many older people are aware of their rights and are determined to push them through. I am delighted to hear about such cases. The problem is that when consultation requires a majority vote—as it should do—a lot of the frailer, more elderly people in the accommodation in question can be leaned on or bullied by the housing association. That is my point.

Let me turn my attention to what can be done about that state of affairs. In the private sector, many tenants have a legally binding service contract. Most sheltered housing providers subscribe to the code of practice for the provision of retirement housing that was established by the Association of Retirement Housing Managers—ARHM. That code makes it incumbent on providers to consult leaseholders about any changes to the terms of the lease. Some charities and housing associations find ways round that code of practice, foisting service charges on to leaseholders without proper consultation, as we have heard this morning.

Leaseholders should be made explicitly aware of their right to consultation under the code of practice, and their recourse to leasehold valuation tribunals should the code be breached. The statutory elements of leaseholders’ rights—such as the right to enfranchise a lease or, as a leaseholder group, to take over the management of services, away from the housing provider—should be extended to charitable organisations and housing trusts.

In my view, such rights should also be extended to the social housing sector. Age UK argues that tenants should be given proper information about the core services offered in their housing scheme, and the terms of reference for any future changes in those services, before they move in to the retirement housing of their choice.

Tenants in sheltered housing provided by local authorities should have a statutory right to be consulted on and challenge local authority decisions that reduce or significantly vary the provision of warden support and other services. Any changes to support services should be voted on by residents, who should have a say in the most appropriate system of alternative support when changes are proposed.

I am grateful for the expertise provided by Age UK and Sheltered Housing UK. Furthermore, my local authority of Dudley—under the recent rating system, it achieved a four-star rating for all its housing services—has proved an excellent support in my constituency for leaseholders in the private sector. I would like to thank Ron Sims and Theresa Kelly for their help with some of the proposals that I put forward this morning.

I look forward to learning more about this issue from the experiences of other hon. Members present for the debate, and I hope that some of the ideas proposed will merit due consideration by the Government.