Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, with reference to the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, published in February 2016, what progress has been made on building the evidence base on specialist housing support for vulnerable people with mental health problems.

Developing a workable and sustainable funding model for supported housing is a priority for the Government. We have been listening to the sector through our earlier public consultation on this issue, and we have also been taking stock of the joint DCLG/DWP Select Committee report on supported housing. We know the supported housing sector needs certainty to help it continue to plan and deliver new much needed supported housing. We will set out further details on our plans later in the autumn.

The Government welcomed the Mental Health Taskforce’s report, the 'Five Year Forward View for Mental Health', and accepted all of the recommendations in its response to this report in January 2017, noting (as regards recommendation 10) that the case for using specialist housing support for vulnerable people with mental ill health is already established, and that the challenge now would be to translate this into action. To date, the Department of Health has committed around £200 million through the Care and Support Specialised Housing Fund, to build over 6,000 new homes, including for people will mental ill health.

The ‘Supported Accommodation Review’, which was jointly commissioned by DCLG and DWP and published in November 2016, estimated the scale, scope and cost of the supported housing sector in Great Britain, across a wide range of client groups including housing for people with mental ill health. The review found that units of supported housing for those with mental health support needs accounted for approximately 5% of total provision of supported accommodation (equating to approximately 33,000 units across Great Britain). A link to the review is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supported-accommodation-review.