Scotland Housing Awards winner 2023
Housing team of the year
What were you trying to achieve?
The project was created following a Sheriff Court Judgement which meant that 636 statutory temporary tenancies were legally secure tenancies leaving the local authority with no temporary accommodation and at risk of significantly breaching statutory duty.
What did you do?
The project team came together within the housing access team to prepare a 12 month people led plan to ‘normalise’ tenancies and rebuild temporary accommodation. This was developed in partnership between a number of teams within the council and registered social landlords with stock in the area, overseen by a heads of service task group with links to the strategic RRTP Programme Board to transform homelessness services.
The programme also influenced the Fife Housing Register Management Executive and encouraged the partnership to change their terms of reference to take a broader focus across housing access and increase contributions to the prevention and resolution of homelessness. The partnership are responsible for the management of over 40,000 properties as well as a range of other statutory and non-statutory activity.
The project was based in a time where the council had just implemented a completely new frontline housing options structure and in the process of making significant changes to temporary accommodation services in response to a range of legal changes. The council had also recently disbanded a PSP arrangement with voluntary sector services and recommissioning over £8m of housing support and homelessness services. This was in addition to the well documented pressures on housing supply, housing access and housing system challenges the have been highlighted in the SHR Thematic Study and the SOLACE, CoSLA and ALACHO Pressures Report.
The small team worked directly with housing customers, service partners and advocacy agencies to help housing and homelessness customers to remain in their homes with help where needed – arranging physical and other forms of support where required. This meant no further transition for vulnerable households and help to build settled, sustainable tenancies in communities they had settled into.
Where current placements within temporary accommodation were not suitable, a case management approach was taken to arrange moves to more suitable tenancies with help. All moves were co-ordinated to ensure that needs were fully met with any support requirement met through a co-ordinated approach between various organisations and services.
What were the outcomes?
Between May 2022 and June 2023 the team adopted a people led approach to:
- Enable over 400 temporary tenancies to be flipped to permanent tenancies allowing homelessness customers to remain in their homes with practical support and no further transition
- Arrange moves for over 200 customers where the temporary tenancy was not suitable due to size, health or other needs in an environment of extremely constrained housing supply and welfare support
- Manged 18 formal appeals to ensure full customer satisfaction
- Work with housing management teams within the council and registered social landlord partners to identify replacement temporary accommodation and bring these into use at pace
- Manage a very limited number of appeals and advocacy responses to find practical solutions for customers. There were no legal challenges
- Develop legacy processes and arrangement to provide a platform for future Rapid Rehousing activity with plans to upscale tenancy flipping as rapid rehousing by default for all homeless customers
- Installed a new temporary accommodation management team and housing management systems to comply with legal requirements
- Provide input at national level to inform rapid rehousing arrangements across the country.
What did you learn?
The programme was so successful that it has been discussed with the housing minister and senior Scottish government officials with a view to rolling out the best practice and lessons learned at a national level. Reports were also provided to Housing Options Hubs and the Temporary Accommodation Task and Finish Group to inform the recommendations to the Homeless Prevention Strategy Group.
