A range of new legislation and guidance is focussing on the quality and regulation of Supported Housing in England, it’s an emerging picture but we are starting to understand how it all fits together, as well as the pros and cons for the sector.
Those of us who have been around for more years that we’d like to admit to may remember the advent of the Supporting People fund, that not only brought with it ringfenced funding for supported housing but also a much tighter quality and inspection regime than we had seen before in the sector. Now, sadly, we are not yet returning to those golden years of ringfenced funding, however, after years of reducing capacity for local authorities to inspect and assess supported housing provision, we are entering a new era of regulation for providers of supported accommodation in England.
Firstly, services for 16- and 17-year-olds now come under the remit of Ofsted. The guidance, released in early 2024, outlines the criteria that will be used to assess supported accommodation for 16 and17 year olds. Rather than using the much discussed and maligned one word Ofsted judgements (Outstanding, Good etc), the inspections of accommodation for 16- and 17-year-olds will be given one of 3 Outcomes, in summary:
· Consistently strong service delivery leads to typically positive experiences and progress for children.
· Inconsistent quality of service delivery adversely affects some children’s experiences, and this may limit their progress.
· Serious or widespread weaknesses lead to significant concerns about the experiences and progress of children.
This feels like a more nuanced and helpful approach than the one-word labels, and I hope it will recognise that resources and quality of buildings varying massively between services, which is often out of the provider’s control. Broadly the evaluation criteria seem to be clear, sensible, and achievable, although there is one statement - “Children have access to specialist help, as required, including support for their mental health” - which is likely to be entirely outside of the control of the supported accommodation provider.
Ofsted delayed the start of inspections from April to September so that providers have time to digest the guidance but also because of the unexpectedly large volume of registration applications they received – 1,300 at beginning of July 2024. At January 2025 Ofsted is still working through the registration application, with 767 services registered on the Ofsted website. One key takeaway for me from looking at the registrations is just how many private providers of supported accommodation there are, compared to the charity/not for profit sector. To date, there are only 10 full inspection reports published, all but one private providers, 5 receiving the “consistently strong” judgment, 5 “inconsistent quality” and 1 “serious or widespread weaknesses”. Although it is impossible to see any trends from 10 reports, it is positive that a number were offering consistently good services, and the reports seem to reflect both the areas for action and the positive in those rated inconsistent.
Turning to the wider supported accommodation sector, we are still awaiting the consultation on the implementation of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act, which was passed in August 2023. The Act is intended to address the issue of poor-quality exempt accommodation and will introduce systems for licensing by local authorities, standards for support and a requirement for local authorities to develop strategic supported housing plans. The Act is welcome; I’m sure many of us have been involved in picking up the pieces for an individual or an area where private providers have opened large buildings purporting to be supported but are at best just accommodation and at worst dangerous places to live for the vulnerable people who are placed there.
However, we had expected consultation on this in the Autumn 2023 and then in early 2024. The Homelessness Minister updated parliament in November 2024 on the progress of the Act, and said that the consultation would be released ‘in the new year’. We know that they also extended the recruitment for the Supported Housing Advisory Panel to end of January, so we should expect to see some further information very soon. As well as the change over, I suspect some of the delays have been because it is a complex area. Can you have the same standards and outcomes framework for emergency homelessness accommodation and long term supported housing for people with learning disability and for sheltered accommodation for older people? What happens when the provision, or elements of the provision, is already regulated by Ofsted or by the CQC? And of course, there is the resource issue – who is going to pay for the inspection regime when the commissioners of services are already overstretched and overseeing multiple services and service types?
In the mix of all of this, we also have new regulation and requirements for social housing, which will apply to many providers of supported accommodation. Post-Grenfell and other tragedies in social housing including the death of Awaab Ishak due to damp and mould, the government has rightly focussed on increasing standards and requiring social landlords to listen and respond to tenant concerns. The Social Housing (Regulation) Act brought in new and revised Consumer standards from April 2024. The most recent consultation which will impact the supported housing sector is on the Competence and Conduct standard, which ended in April 2024 and is yet to publish results. The consultation proposed Registered Providers (RPs) must have a policy on managing and developing skills, a code of conduct for staff and specific levels of qualifications senior leadership and must ensure that anyone delivering housing management on their behalf has suitably qualified staff. So, if a supported accommodation provider has a management agreement with a RP, that organisation will also have to demonstrate it meets the standards and presumably, the RP’s policy on workforce skills for housing management roles.
For medium/larger organisations, the Apprenticeship Levy can be able to be used to fund these qualifications, but smaller providers (those with a pay bill of less than £3m per year) may have to shoulder the cost. It may also see the sector having to shift its staffing models. Often housing management and support are carried out by the same role, but, depending on your RP partner’s policy, that might mean you need all of your team to have a qualification or certain levels of experience. That’s not a bad thing but you may already want them to have a qualification in care or support, and even the most dedicated worker is not going to have time to do simultaneous accredited qualifications. So, you may end up splitting Housing Management and Support roles in order to ensure you meet the standards. Although the recruitment issues the sector has seen since the pandemic seem to be improving, many organisations are still seeing a high turnover of staff. Qualifications are a good thing for retaining staff, and they give people more opportunities, so to ensure organisations keep good, qualified people, they’ll need to make sure pay and benefits are competitive, which in turn is reliant on resources coming in, usually through rents and contracts.
One of the great things about this sector is the range of providers, from the tiny local service that sprang up out of need in a community, to the big providers and RPs who can bring resource and a loud voice to influence policy. This swathe of regulation has the potential to increase quality across the board and make sure more people in more places are supported to live as independently as possible and lead fulfilling lives. But it also increases burdens on a sector that has seen year on year of cuts to budgets since 2010 coupled with the recent cost of living crisis that has made buildings incredibly expensive to run and pushed up staffing costs (and that was before the recent National Insurance rise), often with no increase to contract prices. I hope that this will be recognised and the costs of both implementing and inspecting are funded, especially for smaller, local providers, and the sector is supported and supports each other to focus on the people who need it most.
