Regulating Supported Housing
Phil Saunders considers a dilemma facing the Tenants Services Authority.
The Tenant Services Authority (TSA) is the new regulator for social housing in England, having taken over responsibility for Housing Associations from the Housing Corporation. Part of its functions will be to ensure that associations provide a good service to tenants living in Supported Housing, as well as in their General Needs stock.
But does this require separate standards to be developed specifically for Supported Housing? And if so, is Supported Housing a concept that can be adequately defined? To some extent, this is a challenge the TSA has inherited. For many years, Housing Corporation regulatory and reporting systems have been fuzzy around the edges. Even before Supporting People, there were debates about whether sheltered schemes for the elderly were more akin to supported or general housing. And that’s to say nothing about adapted properties where no further support is provided.
The onset of new models of provision, such as floating support, complicated matters further. It called into question exactly what it was that was being regulated, and by whom. The Corporation (and now the TSA) have been clear that they have no role in regulating support or care services, even where they are being provided by a Housing Association to its own tenants. But, although the focus has been purely on property and other landlord activities, a number of important questions have still remained unanswered, including:
Does the term Supported Housing refer only to developments that were treated as such for capital (and historically – pre 2003 - for revenue) funding purposes?
If funding drives the definition, is this confined to Housing Corporation (now Homes and Communities Agency) grants, or are other public funding (eg Health Service) sources relevant?
Alternatively, should the definition be driven by the needs of the tenants for whom the scheme was originally intended?
What happens if individuals who no longer have support needs are still living in properties that have been designated as Supported Housing?
Conversely, what happens where tenants are getting support, but live either in General Needs housing - or ordinary housing that has been re-designated for supported use (say, as move-on accommodation)?
How should schemes transferred from a local authority, or owned by a local authority but managed by an Arms Length Management Organisation, be regulated?
Supported Housing or tenants with support needs?
The difficulty of these questions – and the implications of imprecise answers for data collection and other regulatory systems, make it tempting to take two steps:
- Regulating Supported Housing
The risk is that this approach glosses over the fact that management of many kinds of Supported Housing is a very different job from General Needs. Over the years, this has been exemplified by the way many Housing Associations have outsourced some or all of their supported housing management activities to specialised agencies. Because of the specialist nature of supported housing management, there are times when an organisation focused on the needs of a particular client group can do a better job, often by providing housing management alongside support.
As direct regulation of managing agents themselves has never been a legal option, the Housing Corporation has traditionally issued guidance on how Housing Associations should monitor them. This is a specialised area that, arguably, requires continuing regulatory attention. It is not within the remit of Supporting People and does not sit easily within standards aimed at outsourced activity in general. Historically, Housing Association partnerships with Supported Housing agencies are a distinctive arrangement, put together for a very particular purpose, with the aim of meeting the needs of some very vulnerable tenants. It could be that specific standards on agency management need to continue.
But it is not just agency managed services that are in question here. Look at some of the areas for which standards are being formulated by the TSA, and it becomes clear that the Supported Housing management task is different from General Needs. For example:
- Regulating Supported Housing
Of course, the new, generic regulatory standards could be drafted to encompass Supported Housing. But that might complicate them unduly. An alternative is to ignore the differences – but this can become unworkably artificial in practice. For example, when the Audit Commission tried to apply generic Key Lines of Enquiry to specialist Supported Housing Associations, they ran into methodological problems. It is difficult to apply the same standards on, say, resident involvement, when one group of tenants have weekly meetings in the communal lounge as a matter of course, as opposed to having to travel across town for special events.
Do specific standards equal better services?
If we are to encourage the provision of good services to tenants living in Supported Housing, we may, therefore, need a distinct standard. This would help to ensure that Supported Housing gets sufficient attention, perhaps in instances where embedding it within generic standards is problematic. Just as importantly, there must be clearly understood and workable boundaries with other “regulatory” arrangements. So, the TSA could consider:
- Regulating Supported Housing
Of course, this brings us back to the definition of Supported Housing. Personally, I don’t think this will ever be 100 per cent water-tight. But that may not be the end of the world, if better standards are encouraged in the thousands of services that we know come clearly under the Supported Housing heading. Maybe it would be worth the effort, even if it causes problems around the edges of monitoring systems and reporting.
Where do you stand on this issue? Should there be separate standards or can Supported Housing be integrated within generic ones? Please let us know by emailing Phil Saunders at phils@sitra.org
