Blog: Starts at Home Day

Posted on 28 August 2024

In this blog to mark Starts at Home Day (Friday, 30 August), Jim Aspdin, our Director of Housing and Assets, highlights the importance of long-term funding to develop tailored housing and support.   

I love this photo of Southdown’s Housing, Property and Housing Support teams on the steps of Brighton’s newly refurbished Discharge to Assess service. The service beautifully highlights the impact of supported housing.

The power of tailored support

Our Discharge to Assess service provides short-term, tailored support and accommodation for people ready to leave mental health inpatient settings. Run in partnership with Brighton and Hove City Council and the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, this service offers much more than just a place to stay. It empowers individuals to regain their independence while also easing the strain on wider health systems and generating significant cost savings to the public purse (it saves up to £650 per night per person).

The urgent need for supported housing

The need for services like this has never been more pressing. Supported housing delivers significant benefits:

• Improved outcomes for individuals: Access to stable housing is a key determinant of health and wellbeing. Combined with tailored support, it has a truly transformative impact on people’s lives, and local communities.   
• Cost savings for public services: Supported housing generates significant cost savings for the public purse by reducing the demand for more expensive services like emergency healthcare, homelessness support, and institutional care, while improving peoples’ overall stability and wellbeing.

Funding challenges for supported housing

Unfortunately, funding for supported housing remains unstable and fragmented. The long-term nature of property investment requires certainty, yet supported housing providers often face short-term funding cycles that make it difficult to maintain, let alone expand, much-needed services.

• Revenue support grants have decreased by 72% over the last decade, from £5.9bn to £1.7bn. These grants are part of the local government finance and can be used to finance revenue expenditure on any service such as housing related support.
• Short-term, piecemeal funding and uncertainty around rents create barriers to sustainable service provision.

This lack of stability and continued funding often forces providers to scale back or close services, which disrupts the lives of people who rely on them. Without a sound business case for investment many housing associations, often those most capable of building significant numbers of supported housing units, have divested away their existing supported housing.

The Wider Impact: Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation

The housing crisis is affecting communities across the South East:

• From April to June 2023, 10,040 people presented as homeless.
• Rough sleeping in East Sussex has doubled since 2020 to 2023.
• This year, 1,279 households in East Sussex are living in temporary accommodation (556 of these are in Hastings), with local authorities facing a projected net spend of over £14 million: an increase of £3 million on the previous year.

Temporary accommodation has serious drawbacks. It’s linked to poorer health outcomes, particularly for children, who are up to four times more likely to suffer mental health issues (Source: Shelter). Recovery and rehabilitation for people with additional needs is more challenging in temporary accommodation settings. Additionally, the shortage of temporary accommodation increases reliance on out-of-area placements, removing people from vital support networks.

Housing: Critical Infrastructure in Need of Investment

Housing is more than just shelter – it’s critical infrastructure that underpins health, care, and community wellbeing.

A recent Altair report estimates the need for an additional 167,329 homes by 2040. To meet this need, the government must develop a long-term strategy for supported housing that includes secure funding for both capital investments and ongoing support services.

Call to Action on #StartsAtHomeDay

On this #StartsAtHomeDay, it’s time for an adult conversation about the future of supported and temporary accommodation. We need a coordinated approach that brings together capital and revenue funding to truly transform lives and communities.