Supporting People in Tameside

5 Year Strategy - Executive Summary

Foreword

Councillor John Taylor, Cabinet Deputy, Personal Services

The Vision : "The Supporting People programme in Tameside will ensure that vulnerable people receive the opportunity to improve their quality of life by providing quality supported housing services that promote independence, and where appropriate, complement existing care and support services."

Welcome to the Tameside Supporting People Five Year Strategy for 2005-2010. Since the implementation of the Supporting People Programme in April 2003 we have made great strides in Tameside to develop new supported housing services, for example for young people in housing need and to ensure that existing services meet the needs of local people.

The Supporting People Team has worked hard to undertake reviews of all services in Tameside in accordance with the requirements of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Tameside is the only local authority nationally to complete its' service review programme in 2 years.

As an excellent authority the ODPM do not require us to prepare and submit a Supporting People Strategy, however, it is our view that achieving excellence requires us to ensure that all services are strategically planned and relevant to our overall objectives as set out in the Community Strategy.

The Supporting People Strategy will contribute significantly to the achievement of Tameside's priorities as set out in the Community Strategy by increasing the availability of supported housing services for some of the most vulnerable people in the borough and promoting independence.

Executive Summary

Introduction

The Government launched the Supporting People programme on 1 st April 2003. The programme is committed to providing a better quality of life for vulnerable people, to enable them to live more independently and maintain their tenancies. Its' purpose is to ensure that the planning, commissioning and development of housing related support services is needs led. The programme aims to provide high quality and strategically planned housing related support services, which are cost effective and reliable, and complement existing care services. The Supporting People programme should assist the local authority to deliver key elements of its' strategic priorities.

Tameside Supporting People Joint Commissioning Group and its' partners agreed the following vision for the programme:

"The Supporting People programme in Tameside will ensure that vulnerable people receive the opportunity to improve their quality of life by providing quality supported housing services that promote independence, and where appropriate, complement existing care and support services."

The Supporting People Five Year Strategy aims to achieve:

• Prevention - helping to sustain people in the community and identify problems before they become a crisis
• The promotion of independence - support to enable people to take their own decisions wherever possible
• Resettlement - support to help people establish themselves in a new community or home
• Inclusion - ensuring people who may be marginalized or who may have challenging behavior have equitable access to services
• Flexibility - develop a range of provision that is flexible and responsive to individual needs

Strategic Context

The Supporting People programme is a cross-cutting programme, intended to deliver services to a wide range of the population. As such it can contribute to the strategic aims of a number of national, regional and local strategic priorities.

The Supporting People Strategy aims to assist the local authority to achieve the delivery framework that underpins the Community Strategy. The Tameside Strategic Partnership produces the Tameside Community Strategy that sets out the Partnership's aims for the future of the borough.

The strategy identifies six key themes:

• Supportive communities
• Safe Environment
• A Prosperous Society
• A Learning Community
• A Healthy Population
• An Attractive Borough

The strategy contributes to Supportive Communities by extending housing choice to some of the most vulnerable people in the borough, for example increasing the availability of services for homeless households and young people. The strategy will contribute to a Safe Environment by providing community based housing support for people adjusting to more independent living, for example new tenancy support services for people leaving prison or other institutions. It contributes to a Healthy Population by enabling the provision of a range of housing related support services that enable older people to live independently at home.

The Supporting People Programme in Tameside

The local authority administers the Supporting People programme on behalf of a Joint Commissioning Group that includes the local authority, health and probation. In Tameside the Supporting People programme provides housing related support services to over 4000 people. 30 providers working to 50 contracts and agreements deliver the programme. These providers include national registered social landlords, voluntary agencies and charities, the local authority, a care trust and a private provider.

Tameside Supporting People team has undertaken 55 service reviews since June 2003. Of these reviews 27 are still progress and 11 will commence in the current quarter. This process has had a huge impact upon supported housing services in Tameside in improving quality, determining strategic relevance and ensuring value for money. It has also helped us to identify unmet need.

I n common with most local authorities the largest single group in receipt of Supporting People services in Tameside is older people. Sheltered housing with a resident manager comprises 55% of all services, in addition extra care housing for frail elderly people provides 5% of services. We also have 2301 units of community and social alarm. The next largest groups of service provision are learning disability at 13% of services and homelessness (families and singles) at 11% of services. 42% of services are accommodation based, 53% are provided via the community alarm and 5% are tenancy support services.

The Joint Commissioning Group and the Supported Housing Forum have identified that there is no provision or an under provision of services for the following groups:

• Offenders
• Homeless households (families and single homeless)
• Young people
• Teenage parents
• People with alcohol problems
• People with drug problems
• Black and Minority Ethnic groups

Developing the Strategy

The Joint Commissioning Group has been actively involved throughout the development of the Supporting People 5 year strategy. The Tameside Supported Housing Forum and the Tameside Housing Partnership agreed the vision, objectives, key priorities specific proposals and ranking. The Tameside Supporting People Joint Commissioning Group approved this strategy at its meeting on 2 nd March 2005.

The Supporting People team has undertaken extensive consultation on the strategy. This has included focus groups with providers, commissioners and other interested parties. We also consulted individuals with specialist knowledge. The Supporting People team utilized the review process to consult service users. We have carried out 76 validation visits in the last 2 years and via this mechanism consulted approximately 700 service users across all types of service provision.

The Five Year Strategy

The Joint Commissioning Group will achieve the vision and aims of the strategy by:

• Developing new services to meet identified strategic priorities
• Reconfiguring existing services to better met strategic priorities
• Introducing measures to improve service delivery through contract compliance and performance monitoring
• Introducing measures to increase the capacity of service providers to provide effective services through the development of local service agreements and protocols and the provision of training
• Informing other strategies of needs identified through the Supporting People review process
• Researching unmet need
• Developing an information strategy to promote supported housing services to all communities
• Using the cross authority arrangements to identify the need for and to procure specialist services
• Joint working with partner agencies, providers and service users to identify unmet needs, improve take up of services by the BME community, to ensure services are targeted at those most in need
• Developing service user involvement in Tameside to ensure that service users are involved in the review process and in the development of future of provision in Tameside.

Resources

The Supporting People grant allocation was £7,480,243 in 2004/5 and is reduced by 4.58% to £7,137,904 in 2005/6. The Joint Commissioning Group has agreed a strategy to manage this reduction that includes identifying efficiency savings through the review process, achieving savings via the procurement process. It also includes a nil increase for inflation in 2005/6. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has announced the national budget for the next three years:

• 2005/6 = £1.72 billion
• 2006/7 = £1.7 billion
• 2007/8 = £1.7 billion.

The ODPM has developed a Distribution Formula to reallocate the national pot between local authorities based on a number of needs indicators. Version 2 of the formula identifies winners and losers in the redistribution with the greatest winners Redcar and Cleveland at +215% and the greatest losers (in percentage terms) Rutland at - 73%. Tameside is identified as a gainer, increasing from an allocation of 0.4% of the national budget to 0.6% (£10.2 million). What is not clear at this stage is the pace of change of the re-distribution. The ODPM have promised that in 2006/7 and 2007/8 no local authority allocation will be cut by more than 5% and none will increase by more than 10%.

Tameside is joint 25 th out of 95 gaining authorities. We assess that a conservative estimate of our allocation increase is about 5%. The ODPM has said that they will finalise the formula and hope to announce 2006/7 and 2007/8 allocations in the autumn of 2005/6. We propose the review the strategic priorities for 2006/7 and 2007/8 at this point.

Setting Priorities:

The Joint Commissioning Group has agreed an approach to setting priorities for assessing existing services and commissioning new services:

• Critical = services that enable the Administering Authority or one of its partners to meet Government performance targets, for example Best Value Performance Indicators to reduce the numbers of homeless people in bed and breakfast by a given date.
• High priority = services that support the Administering Authority and its partners in achieving their statutory drivers (as opposed to their statutory obligations). This category includes cross authority services such as women's refuges.
• Medium priority = those services that support local initiatives, or regional performance targets
• Low priority = those services that may improve the quality of life of service users and may be innovative but do not fit into any of the above categories.

Proposals for new/reconfigured services:

Critical priorities:

• We will increase the availability of services for homeless 16/17 year olds to reduce the use of bed and breakfast facilities by reconfiguring and extending an existing service for single homeless people in 2005/06
• We will increase the availability of services for homeless households by extending an existing service to provide an additional 15 units in 2005/06.
• We will develop an accommodation based teenage parents service providing approximately 7 units in 2006/07.
• We reserve an option to prioritise a further increase in the number of units of temporary accommodation for single homeless people and childless couples if the above increase in units is not sufficient to meet needs and satisfy BVPI requirements.

High priorities

• We will re-provide Katherine House, a service for people with physical and sensory disabilities as a supported housing service in 2005/06.
• We will re-provide Staley House, a service for people with learning disabilities as a supported housing service in 2006/07.
• We will continue to fund existing services that we have assessed as strategically relevant.

The following proposals are dependent on an increase in funding from 2007/08

• We will increase the supply of tenancy support services to under-represented groups by procuring new support services for:
  
  
  • Offenders
  • People with alcohol needs,
  • Drug users, and
  • Women experiencing domestic violence
    
    
• We will increase the proportion of floating support/tenancy support services compared to accommodation-based services.

Other proposals:

• We will research the most effective service provision for black and minority ethnic older people commencing in 2005/06
• We will improve access to services by under-represented groups by Introducing specific performance indicators and outcome measures into SP contracts and promoting the availability of services to all communities
• We will improve the capacity of existing services to work with under represented groups and to meet Supporting People requirements by developing information sharing protocols and providing training.
• We will improve our knowledge base of unmet needs by commissioning research into the needs of specific groups with our colleagues in Greater Manchester
• We will assess the need for wet house provision for people with alcohol needs with our cross authority colleagues
• We will develop a service user involvement strategy
• We will assess the need for Supporting People services in stock transfer areas: Hattersley and Haughton Green.
• We will work in partnership with the Joint Commissioning Team for older peoples services and with providers to strategically review existing provision and to ensure that services for older people are targeted at those most in need.
• We will work in partnership with Social Care and Health to:
• Conclude the review of Learning Disability services that we commissioned from an independent agency in 2004/5,
• Strategically review existing provision and
• Assess the best way of meeting the housing related support needs of people with learning disabilities
• We will undertake a full evaluation of the Supporting People review process with service providers and service users and promote the continuous improvement of services

The Core Strategy Group will oversee the implementation of the strategy against measures identified in the action plans.