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Supporting People now seems synonymous with cutbacks, bureaucracy and controversy. But how can a funding programme which was so welcomed by the housing sector just two years ago have fallen out of favour so quickly?

 

Under Supporting People, local authorities commission services from providers. The scheme was originally intended to bring greater transparency to supported housing costs, which were previously charged by providers to the housing benefit pot with little regulation.

 

But optimism was shortlived with costs spiralling from an original estimate of between £300m and £500m to an actual cost of £1.8bn in 2003, when the scheme was launched. In response the government last year announced a 7 per cent  cut in real terms over the next three years.

 

Housing providers said the cuts would undermine services and cause projects to close. Their fears appeared to have been realised last week when provider Stonham announced up to 200 redundancies as part of a reorganisation made in the wake of Supporting People cuts.

 

More casualties are expected as the cuts begin to take hold but some believe the sector as a whole has little reason to complain about the amount of money put into the programme.

 

Jeremy Swain, chair of the pan-London providers group of homelessness organisations, says all the members of the group are going through the pain of funding cuts. But over the long-term they have all benefited from the programme, he argues.

 

“We know that we have increased the level of support in our projects and we all increased our turnover as a result of Supporting People. We are now taking a cut on the back of a big increase.

 

“But the voluntary sector felt obliged to play its traditional role of whingeing ‘what a terrible settlement’,” says Swain, who is also chief executive of homelessness charity Thames Reach Bondway.

 

But for many agencies it is not just the cuts themselves but the way local authorities are implementing them that is giving cause for concern.

 

As with all council-controlled services, the quality and style of delivery varies from one area to another, as does the way cuts are implemented.

 

Andrew van Doorn, head of programmes at housing development agency Hact, says some authorities have made their cuts in a crude, across-the-board way, without any discussion with providers. Projects are left in “limbo” because providers have no meaningful dialogue with their commissioners and no certainty about their future funding.

 

Van Doorn believes the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister should have taken more responsibility for managing the programme itself, particularly as it involved a fundamental shift to a commissioner-led economy for a sector previously driven by providers identifying work and making funding bids.

 

And local authorities were also given a new role in commissioning services from a sector of which they had little experience, he suggests.

 

Given such tumultuous change funding security was crucial but, van Doorn argues, annual cuts and local variation in commissioning meant that security never materialised.

 

The result is that projects do not feel confident enough to plan ahead. The Housing Corporation recently announced a change to its capital funding arrangements for supported housing because of a 50 per cent fall in applications.

 

Van Doorn says: “The sector has come a long way and it has still got a long way to go. There is lots of uncertainty which means small organisations cannot really plan that well. Supporting People has not enabled the sector to think more in the medium to long term and that is really regrettable.”

 

Large housing associations as well as small local groups have had problems developing new services but local commissioning has introduced additional concerns for the larger national organisations.

 

Sheltered housing providers Anchor Trust, Housing 21 and Hanover met in March to discuss the effects of Supporting People bureaucracy on their services.

 

As national agencies they work with many local authorities, which impose different demands on them. The chief executive of English Churches Housing Group Peter Walter has complained of “wheelbarrows full of paperwork” generated by different local authorities, which were diverting resources away from front-line services.

 

ut one person’s bureaucracy is another person’s effective monitoring. According to Swain, the monitoring and regulatory framework introduced under Supporting People has been one of its great advantages.

 

He suggests that before the programme some agencies were getting money under “false pretences” to deliver support they were not providing. Services that have been decommissioned in many cases did not deserve to receive the money, he believes.

 

“We have to be a little bit self-critical here and say this has helped us to raise standards and the beneficiaries are service users,” he says.

 

But Swain is concerned about other ways councils use their commissioning powers.

 

He argues some London authorities have been “price-fixing” by setting a price for a certain service and tendering on that basis rather than on quality. As a result, niche agencies may be squeezed out in favour of larger providers who can benefit from efficiencies of scale.

 

There is also evidence that local authorities are beginning to interpret their responsibility to commission “strategically relevant” services as an excuse to limit provision to people with a local connection.

 

The result, according to Swain, will be groups of street drinkers and rough sleepers who “wash around the system”, not staying in one place long enough to establish a local connection.

 

According to Sarah Davis, policy officer at the Chartered Institute of Housing, the principles behind Supporting People were excellent but its development in an environment of continuous cuts has not allowed it to stabilise.

 

Unfortunately, for those who crave a period of calm, further change appears inevitable. Davis believes the housing sector must look closely at the implications of the adult green paper, which proposes individual budgets for people to commission their own care.

 

“What isn’t fleshed out in the green paper is how this might work in terms of housing support,” Davis says. She thinks integrating the two agendas will be a challenge for housing providers, particularly if the low-level warden support available in sheltered housing has to be separated from housing costs, or if tenants living in the same building are accessing support from different providers.

 

Nigel Rogers, director of supported housing resource agency Sitra, believes it would be difficult to integrate the green paper with Supporting People because of the nature of some of the groups the programme supports.

 

People with drug, alcohol or homelessness problems are more likely to have emergency, short-term needs and may be more difficult to engage in terms of commissioning their own care, he adds.

 

But van Doorn believes there is no reason why Supporting People cannot exist as part of the personalised-budget agenda, and says professionals’ defence of separate budgets reveals a “silo mentality”.

 

Indeed, it appears as if professionals will have to get used to Supporting People funding existing within a more general pot, with the revelation that the programme is likely to lose its ring-fenced status at some point after April 2006.

 

he news of the demise of the ring-fenced funds was inevitably greeted with warnings that unpopular groups would lose out and local authorities would shift the focus on those to whom they had a statutory responsibility.

 

But van Doorn believes there will be advantages to bringing supported housing funding into the mainstream.

 

Sustaining people in their tenancies could be framed as part of a wider function of supporting people within their community, especially as many social services departments now encompass

areas such as leisure and health, he argues.

 

“What is important is that supported housing is not isolated from all the other things that sustain people’s lives,” he says.

 

Added to these long-term concerns is the consultation expected soon on the redistribution formula for Supporting People funding, which will decide how the allocation each local authority receives will change in the future.

 

Despite the problems, there is still great faith in Supporting People. “I’m still a fan,” says Rogers. “But what we are now getting is change happening at a pace that I’m not sure the sector can fully sustain.”