Looking to the future: meeting need for supported and older person’s housing

At the National Housing Federation, we know the current environment for housing associations that provide specialist housing is challenging. There are significant risks associated with both sustaining present specialist housing provision, and especially with developing more of it to meet present and future need.

Our recent supported housing development survey report points to a limited appetite for building new specialist housing over the next five years for both working-age people with support needs and for older people. The survey also highlights a host of barriers causing this hesitancy.

This is a problematic trend. We know what a critical and life-changing role supported housing already plays in enabling people to live independently, reducing homelessness and relieving pressure on our social care, health and justice systems. Over the next decade, an estimated 125,000 more people will need supported housing of some kind. We must ensure supported housing provision is expanded to meet this future need so it can continue to create life-changing impact for residents and deliver its cost-saving potential for the public purse.

With an ageing population, and with the ever increasing cost of private renting, we will also see an increased need for affordable homes in sheltered and extra care schemes. This will happen as greater numbers of people become in need of integrated housing and support options and look to downsize in a home they can afford.

Our findings

We know housing associations are well placed to deliver this much needed development and create real, lasting social impact. However, as our survey indicates, there remain a host of barriers which make development fraught with risk.

We found that development plans captured in the survey would boost members’ current provision of older person’s housing (amounting to 52 per cent of all members’ older person’s housing stock) by six per cent over the next five years, which equates to an additional 7,347 homes. Of the homes planned, under a quarter have funding already confirmed. To put that into context, projections suggest we need around 12,000 new sheltered or extra care homes each year by the end of the 2040s to meet demand.

Respondents’ plans to develop new supported housing schemes for working-age people are more modest (respondents’ existing stock makes up 29 per cent of members’ total provision). Plans captured would boost supply by three per cent (1,105 new homes in 132 schemes), but this should be read in the context of the reported plans to decommission or remodel nearly three per cent of respondents’ existing stock. Top reasons cited for this withdrawal from or remodelling of schemes were financial viability, improper design and withdrawal of support funding.

These findings are the result of a host of different factors. Capital grant is often too low at the rates available when properties are let at social or affordable rent levels. Added to this is the issue of insufficient or inconsistent revenue funding, which makes the viability of schemes precarious from the offset. Increasingly, the costs associated with land and building are also proving a barrier to development. So too are planning complexities and local plans not adequately reflecting housing need.

The future

Encouragingly, 69 per cent of survey respondents said that they would look to develop more if the conditions were appropriate. With this in mind, what do we need from government to begin to remove the barriers to developing more specialist housing?

We need higher and more flexible capital grant rates to make funding more accessible to a range of commissioners and so it can be adapted to respond to local need. We also need ring-fenced and secure revenue funding for both types of provision, to enable viability for the long-term. As in the case of general needs, there also must be sufficient support for ambitious regeneration and remodelling schemes to improve the design and quality of existing housing provision.

Lastly, we urgently need support for a strategic link between supported housing providers and health and social care if we are to create sustainable and meaningful links between housing and health. The government’s decision to renege on the Department of Health and Social Care’s £300m Strategic Housing Fund to integrate supported housing with health and social care services was a clear step in the wrong direction.

We are looking forward to being able to feed into the work of the government’s Older People’s Housing Taskforce through our Older Person’ Housing Group.

The knowledge, experience and will to make specialist housing delivery work is in abundance across our sector. What we desperately require is the support and capacity to make it happen.