Please see link for coverage of our ESA report in the local media
The Advice Sector Response to Brighton & Hove’s Housing Strategy Refresh
Reply
On the 21st May Daniel Parsonage, Housing Strategy Manager at Brighton and Hove City Council, came to the Advice Service Network (ASN) Meeting to talk to frontline advisers about the refresh of the City’s Housing Strategy. Daniel gave a presentation (http://www.bhconnected.org.uk/sites/bhconnected/files/Housing%20Strategy%20Presentation.pdf) and we then broke into facilitated working groups to discuss some of the broad themes and suggest solutions. 20 people from across 12 organisations and 3 council departments attended
Advice Brighton & Hove, BHT (Start Team), YMCA Sussex Central. MACS, Mind, Age UK Brighton & Hove, Healthwatch Brighton & Hove, Rise, Brighton Women’s Centre (Inspire Project), Brighton Unemployed Families Centre, The Fed, Brighton & Hove City Council – Welfare Rights Team, Access Point (Adult Social Care), Revenues & Benefits
The working groups looked at the 3 main strands of the strategy – Quality, Supply and Support. To see a full breakdown of the feedback received please see the Housing Response June 14
This report has been shared with Brighton & Hove Council – you can keep up to date with progress on the strategy via this blog, alternatively if you would like to feed into this process please contact Daniel Parsonage on daniel.parsonage@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Central Sussex YMCA Local Housing Allowance Research
There are lots of challenges for young people when trying to secure private rented accommodation in Brighton & Hove. These include
• Their age
• Lack of tenancy history
• No deposit or rent in advance
• Out of work, learning or education
• No references
• No guarantors
• Lack of confidence in dealing with landlords
• Low income and/or debts
• No support (through family)
• Lack of affordable properties locally
• Properties that are affordable tend to be short-term or low quality
In response to this Central Sussex YMCA decided to carry out some research, looking particularly at the lack of affordable properties locally. From the 3rd April until the 30th April they logged 207 adverts for single rooms that were advertised in Brighton and
Hove.
The websites used were Gumtree, Friday Ad and Spareroom.com. These are the websites normally recommend to young people as they are the most likely to have private advertisers who don’t have agency fees. They attempted to log all the adverts available on these sites, though it was not necessarily exhaustive.
Out of the 207 properties 14 (7.5%) fell under the Local Housing Allowance rate of £344.41 per month (79.48 per week) to see a full copy of the report and its findings please press here.LHA Research
Issues Regarding Employment Support Allowance (ESA) in Brighton & Hove
Front line advice workers in Brighton & Hove have been expressing concerns about the administration of ESA for sometime. Advice Brighton & Hove agreed to gather evidence from across the sector to look at this more closely. The report examines issues at every stage of the process, from the ESA50 application form all the way through to the appeals process. Our key findings are that
- People claiming ESA do not find the ESA50 questionnaire easy to interpret and in many cases this is causing immense levels of anxiety and stress
- Both claimants and frontline advisers feel that the Work Capability Assessments are not fit for purpose. For the claimant there is a lack of clarity around the entire process, from the length of time they will have to wait to what will happen during an assessment. The assessments themselves are often traumatic. All of this causes a great deal of anxiety to a group of people who are already ill.
- There is a need for better decision making with regards to ESA claims
- The process of Mandatory Reconsideration needs to be reviewed. Claimants are either left without any money at all or encouraged to apply for Jobseekers Allowance while their claim is being reconsidered. This is inappropriate
- The waiting time between a ‘fit for work’ decision and tribunal is far too long. This wait impacts on claimant’s emotional and financial wellbeing and the capacity of frontline advice agencies
It considers the impact that these issues are having on ill and disabled people applying for ESA and for the frontline advice agencies who are supporting them. It goes on to make recommendations relevant to the DWP and the statutory and voluntary sector in Brighton & Hove.
- The DWP to work closely with the advice sector to assess where problems are occurring in the administration of ESA and to work towards resolving these.
- Advice workers in Brighton & Hove should receive appropriate training and support to deal with the increasing workload around appeals and tribunals.
- Advice workers in Brighton and Hove feel that people should be continued to be paid the assessment rate while in the process of mandatory reconsideration
- Recognition should be given to strain placed on advice and other services due to the exponential increase in these problems
To read the full copy of the report please click here – ESA Report
Making work actually work for all: a ‘families & work’ manifesto for 2015
By Richard Dunstan, Policy & Parliamentary Campaigns Officer
With fewer than 400 days to go until the general election in May 2015, teams of strategists, number-crunchers and policy wonks in each of the main parties will be burning the midnight oil between now and the party conference season in September, when the party manifestos are likely to be finalised. And, to help them in their task, we at Working Families have come up with some key policy actions we believe the next government must take if work is actually to work for families – whatever their size and shape.
In recent decades, the world of work has changed enormously – in many ways for the better. But for all too many families, work simply is not working. Time-poor or cash-poor, or both, they struggle to achieve more than a barely tolerable work-life compromise. For them, the world of work has…
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First Independent Review of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) Announced
The Minister for Disabled People, Mike Penning, has announced today that there will be the first independent review of PIP within it’s first 2 years of operation. Paul Gray has been commissioned to carry out this work – he has been chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee since November 2011 and prior to this held a number of senior posts within the Civil Service. The report is to be completed by the end of 2014.
Advice Brighton & Hove recently wrote a report using data from 7 different organisations – Citizens Advice Bureau, MACS, Age UK Brighton & Hove / Macmillan, The Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project (BUCFP), The Federation for Disabled People (The Fed) and The Welfare Rights Team at Brighton & Hove City Council.
The report found that
– Out of 60 clients seen, 3 have been assessed –less than 5%
– 33% of clients have been waiting between 5 and 7 months
– 91% of clients have been waiting longer than 1 month for an assessment date – the length of time the DWP states assessments should be completed by (To read the full report along with appendices please click here)
We will endevour to feed this information in to the current review to ensure that the experiences of people seeking advice in Brighton & Hove are clearly understood.
Brighton & Hove Housing Strategy Refresh
The current Housing Strategy together with the Student Housing Strategy, Older People’s Housing Strategy and LGBT People’s Housing Strategy are due to expire in 2014.
The new Housing Strategy, to be developed by the end of 2014, will not only supersede the Housing Strategy 2009 but will also incorporate the Student Housing Strategy, Older People’s Housing Strategy, LGBT People’s Housing Strategy and unwritten BME People’s Housing Strategy into one new strategy. The strategy will also have specific sections focusing on families and those with a physical disability in addition to other groups in need.
The new Housing Strategy is a key stand alone chapter of the Community Strategy and a fundamental piece of evidence to support the City Plan, our Local Housing Investment Plan and other housing related funding opportunities. The strategy brings benefits to the city through levering in funding for the authority and its partners.
The strategy will be for everyone living in the city as housing has a fundamental effect on our lives whether we are an owner-occupier, living in a social rented home or living in the private rented sector. It is important that the key housing needs that matter to local people are identified and action is taken that will make a real difference to their lives and have a positive impact on the city.
The new Housing Strategy builds on the successes of previous Housing Strategies setting out priorities and strategic goals that make a real difference, making sure the delivery of services will meet changing needs and new challenges faced by local people and service providers.
The new strategy will support the council’s priorities and support, where applicable, other key council policies where housing impacts on the success of those policies.
Although the development of this strategy has not followed the previous path of leading a review of all the strategies within housing there is a commitment that all of the strategies within housing do align and work together to provide effective and efficient services in a time of reducing resources and increased need
Delivery of a new fit for purpose housing strategy and action plan will make sure that services internal and external to the council are able to adapt to and address the city’s housing needs
The time frame for this work is:
Scoping phase to end April 30th
Consultation through until the end of July
Drafting and further consultation throughout Autumn
Completed strategy for December 2014
There will be many events and facilitated workshops feeding in to this process, one of these will be the next Advice Services Network on May 21st – If you are interested in attending please contact me
For any further information or to feed in comments please contact Daniel Parsonage, Housing Strategy Manager and Brighton & Hove City Council at Daniel.Parsonage@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Call for Evidence – Employment Support Allowance
Advice Brighton & Hove recently collected evidence from across the city regarding waiting time for assessments for PIP – this showed that in Brighton & Hove less than 5% of people we support who had applied for this benefit had been assessed and more than 20% of those people had been waiting 6 months to be given an assessment date. The evidence that we produced was used by Caroline Lucas in a parliamentary debate on the impact of welfare reform on people with a disability and The Argus ran a story on it. Since then, Mike Penning, the Minister for Disabled People has been in contact to say that he will investigate the case studies which we used.
Whilst collecting evidence on PIP waiting times it became apparent that there were in fact more problems with Employment Support Allowance (ESA) particularly regarding Work Capability Assessments (WCA) and the new mandatory reconsideration’s. Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) are in the process of producing a report looking at some of these issues and the impact they are having and I would like to add to this with evidence from across the advice sector. It is particularly pertinent at this time as Atos are being released from the WCA contract meaning that it is a good time to lobby government on how a new contract should look.
With this in mind I would like you to contact me with any evidence around ESA. If it is possible I would a brief timeline for individuals you have supported in applying for ESA including the following information
Date of ESA50
Date of WCA
Outcome
Date of mandatory reconsideration (if applicable)
Outcome
Date of Tribunal (if applicable)
Outcome
If you only have partial timelines I would also like these. If your organisation doesn’t collect these kind of statistics then I would also be interested in supporting evidence such as case studies or impact statements from front line advisers. If any of this is unclear please do not hesitate in contacting me.
In the meantime I will be applying for a Freedom of Information request from the DWP asking what percentage of decisions made at WCA were overturned by them at the mandatory reconsideration phase and also to the Tribunals service asking what percentage of decisions made at mandatory reconsideration were subsequently overturned at appeal. I will keep you informed of the results of these throughout the process.
LHA rates and young people in Brighton & Hove by guest blogger Hannah Matthew
I’m a social work student on placement at Housing Advice at the Sussex Central YMCA. I have been working with 18-25 year olds looking for private rented accommodation in Brighton and Hove. Many of the clients that we see will be claiming Housing Benefit and we have been noticing that few properties falls under the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) entitlements (currently £78.69 per week for shared accommodation and £150 per week for a 1 bedroom property)
This means that many of our clients are paying more in rent than they receive in housing benefit. During my placement I am going to investigate clients who have accessed our private rented service and get a broader picture of how many people this effects – I am interested to find out how much short fall there is and how people are coping when they are having to find this additional rent.
The implications of this shortfall are large, It may be that young people are falling behind in their rent: risking eviction, rather than paying the shortfall out of their benefits. Or perhaps they are topping up their benefits by taking on additional work and sharing rooms. At this stage of my research I am not sure what the findings will be – however, it is likely that young people are getting into financial difficulties as a result.
If you have any experiences of LHA rates in Brighton & Hove please feel free to share.
Social Policy Matters 