Category Archives: Housing

People power can transform communities – we need more of it

Guest post by Tracy Fishwick, chief executive of Transform Lives

Leeds Community Homes is striving for a people-powered community housing revolution, placing the new organisation at the cutting edge of housing practice.

The not-for-profit group has raised £360,000 to invest in 16 permanently affordable homes through community shares (a type of share capital called ‘withdrawable shares’ issued by co-operatives or community benefit societies). With the first tenants due to move in by next April, the organisation’s #peoplepoweredhomes campaign is an innovative way to create housing developed by local people, to meet the housing needs of local people. The project wants to create 1,000 affordable homes over the next decade.

People-focused housing solutions are at the heart of the People’s Powerhouse event taking place next month. The housing group’s work in Leeds is the kind of positive story of local change that we hope will inspire delegates to recreate similar projects in their own communities. More good practice like this is vital at a time of chronic housing shortage, with housebuilding falling almost 100,000 homes per year short of achieving the government’s ambition.

You may have read about the People’s Powerhouse which was launched in February and originally billed in the press as “a rival ‘northern powerhouse’ conference to one that advertised 15 male speakers but no women and just 13 of all 98 listed speakers were women”.

Leeds Community Homes, Plus Dane Housing and my own company, Transform Lives, are just some of the organisations taking part. We hope the People’s Powerhouse will help create a dialogue about inclusive, good growth, and its potential to transform communities and lives across the North of England.

Other work worth replicating includes Give Get Go, which Transform Lives collaborates on with a group of housing organisations. The initiative supports social housing tenants into work – connecting unemployed people to employers through volunteering and mentoring, growing skills and confidence and creating jobs. Key to the project’s success is bringing civic institutions and leaders together for the first time to work collaboratively in Liverpool, including the University of Liverpool, Everton FC and the National Trust.

We also work with Plus Dane Housing on its Waves of Hope Big Lottery programme, which aims to tackle homelessness and other complex barriers to work. In just two years, the project has supported 236 people, 83% of whom say their rough sleeping has been reduced. And 67% report a reduction in substance misuse. Both Plus Dane Housing and our other partner, the University of Liverpool, will be showcasing this work at the People’s Powerhouse, underlining the difference we can make when we find good ways of working collaboratively and locally.

Our hope is that we will build a long-term movement for change that supports good and inclusive growth in the North with a particular focus on how people are the key to growth. The aim is to include all sectors and sections of the community, harnessing the combined skills and leverage of the public sector, voluntary, community, civic leaders and business.

As Lord Victor Adebowale, chairman of Social Enterprise UK and chief executive of social enterprise Turning Point, says: “’People’s Powerhouse’ perfectly reflects our vision for economic investment in the North of England.” Social enterprises often find innovative solutions to social issues and as Lord Victor, a People’s Powerhouse keynote speaker, adds: “We cannot allow anyone to be left behind. Investment in the North must be inclusive and must be used to support communities as well as businesses, adding value to the lives of real people.”

* The People’s Powerhouse event takes place on Wednesday 12 July from 10am-4pm at Doncaster Rovers Football Ground. For more information and to register see the website. Discounts are available including for young people and for small enterprises and charities.

Why we need to save sheltered housing from more cuts

“A certain amount of support has gone, so this has made people themselves more involved with each other – we get together more.”

I spoke to older people like Val, Rene and Jane, who live in sheltered housing on the south coast, for a piece in the Guardian this morning; the comment above reflects how the kind of housing they live in has changed radically in recent decades.

Rene spoke to me about the shock felt by residents as support services are cut, their criticism of government and the need to rally round and adapt (with peer-to-peer support, for example) as help is scaled back.

Over 20 years ago, for example, the Worthing Homes sheltered complex I visited had housing staff onsite who ran activities. Now, thanks to years of government cutbacks to sheltered housing support, there are three frontline staff rotating across up to 2,000 homes in the region, depending on need, and drop-in sessions run by external experts.

General sheltered housing, like that run by Worthing Homes, offers low-level support and self-contained accommodation for low income people aged 55 or older. Benefits include greater independence and less reliance on health and social care.

But this kind of housing has suffered thanks to historic and widespread cuts to the supporting people fund (the national programme for housing related support available to councils). Now, it is at further risk. The government was forced last year to defer its unpopular decision to impose a cap on housing benefit to supported housing; the proposal was included in a recent government consultation and is due to covered in a forthcoming green paper. Campaigners including the National Housing Federation (NHF) have been challenging the funding plans, with Age UK warning of “uncertainty about the future of sheltered housing in the social rented sector”.

Residents’ concerns over the loss of on site staff in sheltered housing are well documented, but years of central and local government cuts mean that it is now the norm for on-site staff to be axed in favour of telecare and floating support (short-term help with specific problems like benefits). There are no precise figures, but a 2012 review by Joseph Rowntree Foundation noted that as far back as 2009, local authorities estimated that by 2011, 38% of sheltered housing would have floating support, not on-site provision.

The approach in the Worthing region, an area known for its high proportion of older people, underlines the value of sheltered housing as the population ages, and mirrors similar moves across the country.

Communal garden, Pearson’s Court sheltered housing scheme in Worthing, West Sussex.

Simon Anderson, Worthing Homes head of customer services, says the landlord and residents have tried to work together since the council funding cut: “We were asked to do much more work for less money…but ultimately this is a housing provider and its residents coming together [through agreeing new initiatives] at a time of austerity”.

A 2012 Age UK report, Making it Work for Us [pdf] suggests “listening and responding to the views of residents should be fundamental in shaping what sheltered and retirement housing offers”. Simon explains: “Some people who moved in when there was someone [staff] here all the time…Now they’ll be thinking ‘I didn’t sign up for this’…So in conjunction with them, we began discussions on what the future service would look like. Social isolation was a significant issue for many”.

With the green paper on such issues due after the election, and further funding changes looming, Simon acknowledges “the lack of clarity and certainty”, yet he is resolute: “We have no plans to withdraw our sheltered schemes as they bring significant benefits to our residents as well as savings to the public purse by maintaining our residents’ health, tenancies and independence.”

You can read the full piece here.

Designing for dementia

This year, 225,000 people will develop dementia – that’s one person every three minutes – and 70 per cent of people in care homes have dementia or severe memory problems.

There are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over 1 million by 2025. This will soar to 2 million by 2051, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Despite the prevalence of the issue, a recent report raised serious questions over how prepared we are for the needs of the ageing population. And other research suggests dementia patients are subject to a care postcode lottery ; a further study published yesterday (World Alzheimer’s Day) showed there is no reduction in the use of antipsychotic drugs in dementia care, despite government guidance.

Encouraging dementia-friendly design is an important part of the debate and some of the innovative developments in this area are a welcome contrast to the lack of progress elsewhere.

Care and support charity the Abbeyfield Society has unveiled a £9m new development, Abbeyfield Winnersh, in Berkshire. Early images give one an idea of how design can be used to support people with dementia. Granted, the images look a bit eerie on account of the noticeably absent people, but they at least offer a glimpse of what the new developments in dementia design can offer.

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Each of the 60 residents in Abbeyfield Winnersh will have their own ‘window’ next to their front door (pictured above) – effectively a memory box with instantly recognisable, personal items to help them identify their own door.

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All bedrooms – all leading onto an outdoor space – are arranged in six, circular clusters of 10 ‘households’ aiming to offer a more homely, community feel.

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The furniture and furnishings have been chosen to reduce anxiety with, says Abbeyfield “calming colours and textures chosen to stimulate the senses and promote reminiscent memories”.

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Facilities for family and friends include a playground for young children, above.

Involving the friends and relatives of care home residents in the life of a care home is a crucial and not often acknowledged issue in dementia support. As a previous post on this blog by Kate Murray stresses, the importance of helping children understand and be aware of dementia cannot be underestimated.

In limbo: life for people with learning disabilities moving out of hospital units

Today's Guardian article
Today’s Guardian article

The government promised four years ago to move people from treatment and assessment units following BBC Panorama’s exposure of abuse at the privately run Winterbourne View.

The preventable death of 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk, who drowned in a Southern Health trust unit in Oxfordshire three years ago, and the subsequent Justice for LB campaign, further fuelled demands for action and accountability over the treatment of learning disabled people. In October, NHS England and council leaders set out a £45m plan to close England’s last NHS hospital for people with learning disabilities, plus up to half the 2,600 beds in the units.

But according to the latest figures, in June more than 2,500 people were still languishing in such units as the pace of change is so slow.

My piece in the Guardian today focuses on what happens to people as they are moved out of these secure hospital facilities and back “home” – “into the community”.

Some, like Ben Davis, who has autism and complex needs, are passed from pillar to post as suitable local support just doesn’t exist. Family-led research published today by charities Bringing Us Together and Respond highlights the problems for people like Ben.

Ben was admitted to an assessment and treatment unit (ATU) miles from his home after his first supported living placement broke down. After the ATU, he moved to a newly built flat nearer his family but that support has now also broken down. He has to move again, into temporary accommodation, while care commissioners organise the next option.

When I interviewed Ben’s mother, Catherine, she was both eloquent and outspoken as she described how the human rights of her son were being eroded after he was repeatedly failed by the very system designed to support him.

This is where we are today. Upwards of 2,500 people stuck in inappropriate, discredited care, and the strong will to get them out is being undermined by the lack of a clear way.

And meanwhile, many parents – every single one of whom has spent years relentlessly fighting for the right support – feel they cannot always openly challenge the authorities, such is the fragile and often hostile relationship between families and commissioners of care.

* Names and details in the article have been changed

* Read the full Guardian piece here and the check this for reports by Bringing Us Together and Respond on which the article is based

How English councils are supporting unaccompanied child asylum seekers

Ports of entry like Kent and Croydon look after a disproportionate number of child asylum seekers, and government funding doesn’t cover all the costs, as I explain in a piece on the Guardian’s social care pages.

Many concerns were raised at the National Children’s and Adults Services Conference in Bournemouth in October, and are reflected in recent research from Brighton University. This describes “an extremely uneven distribution” of unaccompanied minors. A Freedom of Information request reveals that seven out of 150 English councils look after 43% of all unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

In Kent, there are 1,384 unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people, including 982 under-18s; more than a third of all looked-after children.

Peter Oakford, cabinet member for specialist children’s services says: “It’s been the most difficult year Kent county council has ever experienced regarding unaccompanied asylum seeking children … This places enormous pressures on staff in services within the council, foster carers and education services as well as all our partner agencies like the police and health.”

Amid the debate about dispersal schemes and funding shortfalls, Kent’s latest figures reveal the human cost; 180 children do not have an allocated social worker and are still waiting for a full assessment.

Read on here.

People with learning disabilities are not scroungers or superheroes

The MBE recently won by Shaun Webster is, he says “two fingers” to the bullying colleagues who tormented him when he worked in a warehouse some years ago.

You can’t disagree with the 43-year-old’s use of frank language – his deeply unpleasant workmates once used sticky tape to bind Webster, who has a learning disability, and stuffed a rag in his mouth. This was done “as a joke”, he recalls in an interview I did for today’s Guardian. Little wonder he has devoted his life since then to fighting for inclusion and equality.

As explained in today’s piece, the international project worker for Leeds-based human rights charity Change is a sought-after speaker and trainer in the UK and overseas. His work includes advising government departments about inclusive employment, promoting access to sex and health education for learning disabled people and recent visits to Thailand and Croatia to train health, social care and charity professionals about independent living and disability rights.

Shaun talks passionately and persuasively about issues like employment rights and independent living for people with learning disabilities, making the point (usually missed by policy makers and politicians) that the two issues must be seen together; earning your own money and having a role and responsibility supports independence.

Shaun’s current work involves a partnership with children’s charity Lumos, supporting young people to leave institutions and gain independence, choice and control. Linked to that piece of work is the report Shaun wrote, Leaving Institutions, a really great example of a publication written with a clear focus on people (not targets or statistics, or a homogeneous mass) by authors who truly know about and have experience of what they’re talking about.

The entire interview can be read here and the film below is worth a watch too:

The hidden victims of domestic violence

Beverley Lewis House is the only refuge in the UK that caters for women who have learning disabilities. Photograph: Beverley Lewis House
Beverley Lewis House is the only refuge in the UK that caters for women who have learning disabilities. Photograph: Beverley Lewis House

Barbara Davis’s abusive boyfriend burned her fingers on the stove when he discovered her packed suitcase under the bed and realised she was trying to leave. He had controlled Davis, 36, who has a mild learning disability, for years. He isolated her from family and friends, verbally abusing her parents until they stopped visiting. He locked her in the privately rented London flat they shared, goading her to kill herself. She recalls: “He told me to strangle myself with a wire … he wanted me to die.”

Davis (who eventually escaped) told her story to researchers from the Tizard Centre as part of a project to explores the experiences women with learning disabilities who suffer domestic violence. The work, which also looks at the attitudes and practices of professionals who support such women, is featured in my Guardian piece.

There are some shocking – although perhaps not surprising (given the low profile of learning disability as an issue) – facts included in the piece. Among them, that the UK has just one specialist domestic violence refuge for women with learning disabilities. What’s more, most police officers (often the first point of contact in a domestic abuse incident) do not believe that a learning disability makes women more vulnerable to domestic violence.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

The Tizard Centre project can be accessed here and information on Beverley Lewis House here.

Telling the untold stories of austerity


Women in Croxteth, Liverpool, discuss the impact of cuts on communities, part of the research for the new book, Austerity Bites

Do you know what austerity really means?

Here’s a definition from the Collins Dictionary, as quoted in Mary O’Hara’s commanding new book on the subject, Austerity Bites: “…difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce the budget deficit, especially by reducing public expenditure: a period of austerity/austerity measures.”

But that literal definition, and the words of politicians using the rhetoric of austerity to mask the harsh impact of public spending cuts, conveys nothing of the human cost of the unprecedented reform of the welfare state.

Austerity Bites redresses that imbalance. I don’t usually do reviews on this site, but this timely book demands attention.

Reading this book means you join the award-winning journalist O’Hara in her “journey to the sharp end of cuts in the UK”. Based on a 12-month trip around the country meeting diverse people affected by cuts as reforms were introduced in 2012 and 2013, O’Hara gives a platform to untold stories of hardship.

O’Hara’s book suggests, “austerity” has become an acceptable rhetoric, one that glosses over the harsh impact of welfare reform – as in “cuts hurt but in the age of austerity, what else can we do?” The creeping normalisation of food poverty and food banks, as explored in this book, is shameful.

While an intricate explanation is given of the political and economic context, it is the lives of those whose voices are rarely given a platform – the homeless, the disabled, the young among them – that are the focus here.

Crisscrossing the country, the picture is one of political classes living in a “bubble” untouched by the harsh reality of life on the front line of Austerity UK; a massive chasm between the people suffering from the impact of cuts and abolition of vital benefits and the people making the decisions to abolish that support.

People talk of “breaking point”, “existing not living”, their “desperate situation”; the book does much to explode the myth of benefit Britain. A fairly comprehensive catalogue of unfairness is chronicled in Austerity Bites – the disabled, for example, are shown to be bearing the brunt of cuts, the vulnerable are made more vulnerable and the poorer become poorer.

As one man, Dec, who O’Hara meets on a Luton estate tells the author: “Do I deserve better? Do other people deserve better? I think they do.”

Unsettling, but vital, reading, this book lays bare the real, true story of austerity.

Development and disability: new report urges action

Hazrat Bilal and family, Bangladesh (pic: Sightsavers)
Hazrat Bilal and family, Bangladesh (pic: Sightsavers)

Hazrat Bilal from Narshingdi, Bangladesh, has been blind since birth, but it was only in 2008 at the age of 33, with support from Bangladeshi charity Action for Blind Children, that he was officially registered as permanently disabled. That led to more support from services for the visually impaired; Hazrat got to know other people with sight problems and began to gain confidence.

The 39-year-old now runs his own grocery shop and has helped form a self-help group. It was only after help from the local charity, a partner of international charity Sightsavers, that his life was transformed but if more international development and aid plans were disability-inclusive, there would be many more stories like Hazrat’s.

One billion people all over the world – 15 per cent of the population – have a disability, according to the World Health Organisation. Of that total, 80 per cent live in developing countries.

Despite the fact that one of the eight Millennium Development Goals that world leaders agreed in 2000 was that every child should have a full primary education by 2015, more than a third of the 57 million children worldwide missing out on school have disabilities (see this stunning picture story about blind schoolchildren in Uganda). It seems incredible but disability was not included in the Millennium Development Goals.

Disabilities contribute to global economic, political and social development but it is well documented that development programmes overlook disability issues. That may change if a new report by the International Development Select Committee on disability and development has any impact. Today’s report urges the Department for International Development (DFID) to strengthen its work to include people with disabilities and calls for a focus on disability as a development issue.

The report’s recommendations echoes some of the actions outlined in international charity Sightsavers’ Put Us in the Picture campaign. Launched last year, the campaign calls on policymakers and politicians to include disabled people in international aid and development plans, highlighting the links between disability and poverty.

Specifically, the campaign says the government must ensure people with disabilities participate in, and benefit from, international development programmes and must talk, listen to and work with people with disabilities and their families. It also argues that DFID staff should be trained to include people with disabilities in their work.

You can support the Put Us in the Picture campaign here or follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #InThePicture

Home ownership for vulnerable people

How can someone with learning disabilities or mental health issues possibly own their own home? With a long-established but seldom-used form of housing called shared ownership.

The power of the part-rent, part-buy scheme to transform lives is illustrated in a new report, Space to live, published today by social care and housing provider Advance and Disability Rights UK. I was involved in writing part of the report and met home owners like Xenia Kyriacou, who is non-verbal and has complex needs.

Once asked to leave a restaurant after showing challenging behaviour and overturning a table in frustration (she was overwhelmed), only a few months ago, in another local restaurant near the two-bedroom flat she part-owns in east London, Xenia enjoyed a birthday lunch, was presented with a card from the owners and offered a discount on her return.

The change has happened since she moved out of residential care and into her own place.

Home ownership encourages confidence and independence, as was obvious when I met some of the home owners like Xenia and learned more about their experiences. The increased stability can reduce the costs of social care packages and help people get involved in their local areas. The timely report comes as the government considers funding plans for housing for post-2015, including its home ownership for learning disability (HOLD) programme.

You can read more about the report here on the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group website and on the Advance website.