The Supporting People programme was launched in April 2003. The programme was designed to enhance the quality of life for vulnerable people through the use of housing support services. The programme uses housing support services to deliver two main kinds of service:
• Services that enhance independence by enabling people to live independently in their own homes, including older people or people of working age with disabilities or working age adults with a learning difficulty. These services often enhance and extend packages of care and support provided by social care and NHS services.
• Services designed to enhance the independence, well-being and inclusion of socially excluded adults, such as single homeless people, former offenders or people with a substance misuse problem. In terms of single homelessness, Supporting People is primarily focused on housing related support that provides homelessness prevention services (see Chapter 4) and resettlement services. Resettlement services are for when single homelessness has already occurred and provide a mixture of floating support, supported housing, and emergency accommodation to prevent a recurrence of homelessness (see Chapter 5). Some housing support services, particularly floating support services, can have both a preventative and resettlement role. Not all preventative services or resettlement services are funded through the Supporting People programme.
In England, Supporting People was
introduced with a ring-fenced budget, which meant that each area had a dedicated ‘pot’ of funds that were intended solely for commissioning Housing Support services. Supporting People Administering Authorities were established (the county councils
and unitary authorities in England) and required to produce area strategies.Similar
arrangements exist in Scotland and Wales, although in Northern Ireland the programme is administered through the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
Supporting People has been praised as introducing a far more coherent system of financing and planning for housing support services than existed in the past. The combination of a dedicated budget, commissioning bodies and area strategies meant that greater coherence and consistency in the provision of Housing Support services was achieved (Pleace, 2008a).
Following extensive consultations, a new national strategy for England called
Independence and Opportunity (CLG, 2007c) was published. This strategy encouraged housing support services become more ‘holistic’, i.e. concern themselves with not just the housing needs of groups like single homeless people, but also their social and economic position. A similar review in Scotland reached the same conclusions. While flexibility in respect of joint
commissioning with health and social care services already existed for most local authorities, this did not allow commissioning in other areas that might make services more flexible and more comprehensive. A key example of this was the potential for housing support services to directly provide education, training and employment (ETE) services for socially excluded groups, like single homeless people, and/or to create formal working arrangements with suitable ETE service providers (see Chapters 5 and 7). Housing support services might also take a role, for example, in helping manage issues like anti- social behaviour in the community, which might include some work with some single homeless people with challenging behaviour. In Scotland, the Supporting People budget has been merged with the general grant to local authorities and is no longer ‘ring-fenced’, i.e. there is no longer any set of specific
‘Supporting People’ requirements governing how the money is used.9 In England, the ‘ring- fence’ around Supporting People funding was removed in April 2009. All local authorities will have the freedom to spend the money how they see fit locally on any group or service. Wales and Northern Ireland have not yet followed the same direction.
The removal of constraints on how Supporting People funds are used is viewed as creating potential risks as well as the opportunities already described (see for example, CLG, 2008a; House of Commons, 2009).These risks include:
• the lack of legal duties requiring the provision of housing-related support by local authorities, which means there is no statutory constraint on authorities to stop commissioning some types of services; • concerns about funding loss within the
charitable and voluntary sectors, if some former Supporting People funds are diverted elsewhere (for example into social care rather than housing support services); • concerns that funds might be diverted
away from ‘unpopular‘ groups, which might include some groups of single homeless people;
• a concern that, without a dedicated pot of funding, Supporting People will lose strategic and political importance at local level, as area strategies will no longer have access to a Supporting People budget that cannot be used for anything else; and • a concern that overall funding levels for
housing support services will decrease significantly as part of the impacts of the comprehensive spending review over the course of 2011-2015.
There is the theoretical possibility that funding for Housing Support services could be
significantly constrained, or indeed removed entirely, because a local authority would have that discretion. Large cuts could mean that the third sector could constrict, might be de-skilled in certain respects, and prompt a
reduction in innovation in service delivery that is particularly associated with third sector providers (Pleace, 2008a). Although it is a little early to assess the effects of the removal of Supporting People ring fencing, a survey conducted by Capita and Inside Housing of 103 supported housing providers in June 2010 found that over a third (36%) had already experienced significant reductions in their Supporting People budgets.10
Amongst key stakeholders, Supporting People was seen as one of the most important policy changes in the last decade. It was widely seen to have benefited single homeless people greatly, to have encouraged strategic working and the development of new and improved interventions and services.
I think Supporting People has probably had a huge impact, because Supporting People has really become a … fantastic catch-all for people who fall outside of the other statutory safety nets. So people who don’t have priority need, people who don’t pass the criteria for a learning disability… or a mental health issue are able to access the support that they need to regain their independence.
(Key stakeholder, non-statutory sector) Unsurprisingly, most had concerns about the removal of ring-fencing and echoed the concerns noted above. In particular, they were concerned that pressure on statutory services would result in a diversion of funds away from groups that do not have statutory protection, who are often the most socially excluded and that existing Supporting People services would be threatened.