Publication - Advice and guidance
Supported Housing Task and Finish Group Summary Report
This sub-group of the Homelessness Prevention and Strategy Group was set up to consider the future role of supported housing for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. This is a summary of the main report.
9. Conclusions
9.1 The overall goal is to provide high-quality supported housing as a settled housing option for the small number of people who don’t want or can’t sustain mainstream housing. The future role of supported housing as a response to homelessness in Scotland can be further summarised as:
- Being jointly planned and commissioned by strategic housing authorities and health and social care partnerships, with the local authority retaining overall responsibility for people who enter the homelessness system.
- Maximising security of tenure, toward models that use Scottish Secure Tenancies or, in some models, Private Residential Tenancies.
- Having adequate capital and revenue funding to mitigate the ‘benefit trap’ created by high rents that prevent people’s access to employment or learning opportunities and create unintended consequences for local authorities.
- Located in the community with routes to services from all parts of housing, health and social care – breaking the legacy of ‘homeless’ supported housing and breaking down ‘care group’ silos and stigma at a local level.
- Be self-contained homes with own bedrooms, bathrooms and cooking facilities and with easy access to great support on-site or nearby.
9.2 This represents a new direction of travel that will need changes to the way that supported housing is commissioned, and a transformative programme that enables social landlords to remodel or reprovision existing models of supported housing.