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Recovery Festival 2014 |
Housing
8 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| August 2014
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
H
ousing and employment are at the
core of recovery, said Marcus Roberts,
chief executive of DrugScope,
referring to the charity’s
State of the
sector
report. But there were
significant challenges. It was not just about the
availability of housing, but also the quality. There
were significant gaps in housing and housing
support, with a distinct lack of suitable
accommodation for people still using drugs.
Localism had given local authorities more
discretion, so it was important for the substance
misuse sector to make its case, said Roberts. ‘We need
to respond to the new challenges with resilience,’ he
said. While the squeeze on local funding was painful,
it should also make us ‘think more creatively, with
energy and passion’.
There was a lot going on that we could learn from,
he said, including the Chartered Institute of Housing’s
compendium of good practice and St Mungo’s
Broadway’s (SMB) report on the needs of homeless
women.
But we needed to fight to maintain a skill base and
the ‘multiplicity of people’s needs should be a starting
point to rally around’. It was a ‘critical time of
challenge, but also of opportunity,’ he said.
Bill Randall, chair of Brighton and Hove City
Council’s housing committee, shared his experiences
of a densely populated city that had ‘an enormous
problem with space for housing’, where local
landlords were increasingly reluctant to take people
on housing benefit. The city had 2,000 heroin and
cocaine users and although drug-related deaths were
now falling, it had had the unenviable title of being
‘the drugs death capital of Britain’ for some time.
‘A real spirit of partnership’ had been key to
changing the city’s approach to drug and alcohol
problems, pulling together housing providers, public
services, the voluntary sector, faith groups and other
organisations. Pooling budgets to make the most of
diminishing resources was a constant challenge, but
‘returning public health to local government has been
critical to changing what we’re doing,’ said Randall.
With much of Brighton’s housing allocated to
market rent, shared ownership or sale, imaginative
solutions had been needed to help the city’s most
vulnerable. One such example was Brighton Housing
Trust (BHT)’s scheme of container homes, shipped
from Holland, which were of a much higher standard
than some of the existing private rented sector.
‘The idea is that you have a pathway from the
street into supported housing and then into
independent housing,’ said Randall. ‘What you can’t
do is put people in mainstream housing and leave
them there, which has happened in the past with
disastrous effects,’ he added. ‘As someone said at a
recent tenants’ meeting, if you put a vulnerable
tenant in a block of flats and don’t support them, you
make every other tenant vulnerable.’
The value of partnerships was underlined by Ron
Dougan, chief executive of Trent and Dove Housing,
who pointed out that ‘the media love nothing better
than to give bad news stories about housing
associations and their tenants’, highlighting anti-
social behaviour stories as front page news. He
admitted that he had himself ‘not been hugely keen
‘Housing and employment
are at the core of
recovery... We need to
respond to new
challenges with resilience’
MARCUS ROBERTS
Decent long-term
housing has been
identified as one of the
biggest determinants
of recovery, so how can
we address a critical
lack of provision?
DDN
reports from last
month’s Recovery
Festival
IS ANYONE IN?